


The Bioweapon and the Cure

by forestfantail



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Dimension, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant up to 7x3, F/M, Fitz's POV, Friends to Lovers, Post Season 7 Ep 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:15:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 27,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25286704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forestfantail/pseuds/forestfantail
Summary: "The Director," she said, "wants us to take a moment to relax. As a family. We get so few moments of peace."Family. They talked like that, like they were in some kind of travelling space commune instead of S.H.I.E.L.D. This wasn’t anything like his S.H.I.E.L.D. For one thing there wasn’t anyone like Dr. Jemma Simmons in his S.H.I.E.L.D.Or: The team stumbles into an alternate dimension and picks up another Fitz. Because I miss him too damn much.
Relationships: Alphonso "Mack" Mackenzie/Yo Yo Rodriguez, Lance Hunter/Bobbi Morse, Leo Fitz/Jemma Simmons
Comments: 30
Kudos: 46





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this after Season 7 Episode 3, so sorry no Sousa or May with powers. The team has had other adventures between the end of Ep 3 and the start of this story (including a trip to the 80s, apparently).
> 
> Mistakes are mine but Agents of Shield is not. (A girl can dream though.)

“I’m going below,” Fitz said. He said it in her direction, and he wasn’t even sure why—why did he feel the need to check in with her every few minutes? He just knew that he needed to speak to her, because the lab had gone so silent and…just because.

“Checking the landing gear again?” she asked. She wore a patient smile. She was always patient with him.

“Yep,” he said. There wasn’t an actual need to check the landing gear—he just wanted to be alone. He wasn’t interested in talking much right now. He never knew what to say. Everything was different, especially him, and he felt wrong every time he opened his mouth.

“Oh, and Dr. Simmons?” He saw her wince and—see, there it was. Every time he spoke he messed something up.

“Yes, Fitz?”

“May I have permission to skip the team dinner tonight? I want to work on the jump drive.”

Dr. Simmons frowned. The fact that he didn’t want to be around any of them seemed to be one of the ways he most disappointed them. What did they expect, though? _I don’t know any of you!_ he wanted to scream, but he was trying to rein in his anger. This wasn’t their fault, any more than it was his.

Ok, maybe it was a little their fault. Pulling someone out of their own timeline and dropping them into another dimension that they didn’t understand and then expecting them to be someone who he just wasn’t—that was kind of wrong of them. But they hadn’t done it on purpose. That’s why he was intent on fixing the jump drive. Get it fixed and get him home. Solve their problems as well as his own.

“Mack—the Director,” she said for his benefit. He didn’t understand how they could refer to the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. as “Mack.” The same as he wasn’t going to refer to the legendary Agent Coulson as just “Coulson” or the head of his lab as “Simmons.” Or “Jemma.” She had asked him several times to call him by her Christian name, but who was he to disrespect his boss that way? Also, the way that the vowels rolled off his tongue, so slowly it felt like he was never going to reach the end of it—Jeeemmah—it was much too intimate. She didn’t belong in his mouth like that, this beautiful space and time-trotting scientist. He would get back home, and she would forget all about him. And he would think about her for the rest of his pathetic life.

“The Director,” she said, “wants us to take a moment to relax. As a family. We get so few moments of peace.”

Family. They talked like that, like they were in some kind of travelling space commune instead of S.H.I.E.L.D. This wasn’t anything like his S.H.I.E.L.D. For one thing there wasn’t anyone like Dr. Jemma Simmons in his S.H.I.E.L.D.

Fitz nodded. He didn’t want to open his mouth and say something else that made her face fall.

“You’ll enjoy it,” she said, her smile returning. She looked so hopeful. What the hell was happening? Why would a woman like that care how he spent his time? Who had this other Fitz been to her?

He nodded again and left the room.

xxx

Fitz walked into the lab, which had been turned into a kind of dining room with chairs and a tablecloth over the holotable. He wasn’t too comfortable with people eating in his pristine workspace, but he supposed you made do with what you had on a spaceship.

The Director sat at the head of the table, and he made a toast to teamwork or togetherness or some other hippie nonsense. They all drank, including him. He wasn’t a big fan of Zima, but Deke, the annoying one, seemed so proud to have procured it for them in one of their time jumps that no one seemed to have the heart to tell him it was rubbish. What he wouldn’t give for a pint. Curled up with his mum’s cat and watching Doctor Who, the way he always liked to spend a weekend off. Take the train up from his S.H.I.E.L.D. lab in London, get away from the colleagues he didn’t speak to and the friends he didn’t have. Good times.

“So, Fitz,” said Yo-Yo, who was sitting across from him, “any progress on the jump drive?”

“Hey,” said the Director. “No shoptalk.”

“I just wanted to give him a chance to talk about what he’s doing. He’s been working so hard. And we see that.”

He could tell that the woman was trying to be encouraging, and he looked around the room and saw that they were all giving him warm smiles. He felt himself blushing.

“It’s coming along.”

“If we can’t talk shop then can we talk timelines? Because I want to know what yours is like. Mine was super messed up, but yours seemed ok, from what I saw. You had real food, which must be nice.” Deke was always trying to relate to him as a fellow man from another world. But honestly, the man’s personality was so grating and he was so eager that Fitz felt even more disoriented in his presence than any of the others. He seemed to want something from Fitz, like validation or encouragement. Maybe the other him had been Deke’s mentor? He followed him around like a lost puppy.

“I don’t know what to tell you. It was different.”

“It looked like our world,” said Daisy. “Except S.H.I.E.L.D. was still,” she paused like she didn’t know how to explain the difference, “big.”

“It is big,” said Fitz. “All over the world. Except I don’t think that we have anyone off-world. Or travelling through time.” He looked at Dr. Simmons, who was staring down at her plate. “You have things here we don’t have.”

“So you want to stick around? I did. They have Zima and fun tech. And if you die there's like a fifty-fifty chance they can bring you back to life,” Deke said.

“Plus we have good dental,” said Agent Coulson. “And sometimes we can get back to the right time and place to use it.”

Everyone nodded, lost in their own thoughts. He wondered how long it had been since any of them had been back to their own homes and families. He and Deke weren’t the only ones out of place.

“Thanks, but I’d rather get back to my own dimension. We have pretty great healthcare.”

From their conversations, he understood that Deke had been taken from a place to which he couldn’t return, that Deke was trapped because the future he had lived in no longer existed. That wasn’t the case for Fitz, and he wasn’t about to stay here if he could help it. And with the solution being a tech one, he liked his odds.

xxx

When they had first found him there had been a lot of screaming, most of it his own. They—Daisy and Agent Coulson and Dr. Simmons—had been running from an army of creatures dressed in costumes from other eras—some early 20th century American police, some 1950s secretaries, and one Marty McFly from the 1980s. All had expressionless faces and carried large weapons. He had turned in the hallway, right outside his lab, to see the three S.H.I.E.L.D. agents in front of an army in Halloween costumes, all running toward him.

He had screamed, and Dr. Simmons had as well.

“Fitz!” she said.

“What the—” said Daisy and slowed in front of him, but Agent Coulson had grabbed her arm and Fitz’s too and said “Get moving” to them both.

He hadn’t had time to wonder why the beautiful woman had known his name; he was mostly just terrified of being grabbed and pushed and now there was a stitch in his side from all the running.

“What is happening?” he said. One of the armed theater folks shot at them just before they turned a corner, and Daisy collapsed the walls and ceiling behind them with a wave of power from her hand. Fitz ducked and covered his head.

“Is there somewhere to go, somewhere to get safe?” asked Agent Coulson. “We can’t run forever.”

“Fitz get up; what’s wrong with you?” said Daisy, trying to haul him upright.

“Who are you?” said Fitz. “What the hell is happening?” Another loud bang sounded from behind the rubble along with a scream, probably from one of his colleagues.

Dr. Simmons grabbed his arm and looked into his eyes. “We’re here to help. Where can we hide?”

He didn’t know why, but her touch and the way she looked at him terrified him more than the monsters chasing them. He froze.

“They’re coming!” said Daisy. She threw another shockwave behind them (the floor shook like an earthquake). An arm clad in the red leather jacket from Thriller was shoving its way through the rubble.

“Fitz. Please,” said the beautiful woman who knew his name and still held his arm.

“In there,” he said. He pointed to one of the many doors along the hallway. “It’s a break room, and there’s a fire escape to the alley below.”

“A fire escape? That doesn’t seem very S.H.I.E.L.D. super spy.” Daisy was opening the door for them but let the others enter in front of her, keeping her eyes on the rubble being cleared by an increasing number of hands.

“It’s cloaked,” said Fitz. He ran to a window and pressed his hand to a spot on its sill. The window beeped and then rolled upward. A set of steel stairs materialized outside it.

“Cool,” said Agent Coulson, and he ducked through the window.

“S.H.I.E.L.D. has cloaking already in this dimension? I thought only Hydra had it at this point,” said Dr. Simmons as she climbed out after him.

“This dimension?” said Daisy. She was shoving Fitz in front of her through the window.

“Hydra?” asked Fitz. Through the metal slats of the stairs he could see the pavement, many, many floors below. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely grip the railing.

“We’ll be easy targets on the stairs,” said Dr. Simmons. She was on the step just below him. A cold wind whipped her hair against his cheek; it smelled of lavender.

“I don’t think that will be a problem for long.” Coulson was staring in front of them, where an enormous plane was decloaking, hovering in mid-air. A side door opened and two men—a large one and a scrawny one, shoved a sort of gangplank, complete with handrails, toward them.

“We can’t get close enough,” said a woman’s voice projecting from the plane. “You’ll have to jump.”

“No bloody way!” Fitz was screaming again. An explosion from the break room behind him knocked him forward against Dr. Simmons, who only just managed to grab the stair railing before she was shoved into thin air.

“Move!” yelled Daisy behind him.

Fitz didn’t remember all of the details about the jumping; the trauma was so extreme that he guessed his brain closed off those memories for him. Thanks brain.

He did remember more screaming and someone shoving him (Daisy must have given him some sort of extra-powered push) and then a large man catching him (it must have been the Director, he realized later). The others were much braver than he was, and he acted a cowardly fool in front of the beautiful woman, but he was alive, and that was all he had the energy to think about once they were on the plane.

“There were too many to fight,” said Daisy, as Fitz huddled wrapped in a blanket in the corner of some spacey lab-room.

“It was a trap,” said Yo-Yo.

“It was an ambush,” said Agent Coulson. “They brought the entire Peanuts gang for this one.”

“But how did they travel here? How did they lead us here?” asked Dr. Simmons.

“What do you mean? We followed them through time just like we always do,” said Daisy.

“But this isn’t just another time. This is another timeline. Another dimension, essentially.”

“Wait,” said Daisy, looking first at the Director and then at Deke. “Is that even possible?”

“That’s why I’m confused,” said Dr. Simmons.

“How do we know it’s another timeline?” asked the Director.

Dr. Simmons turned to Fitz, who was trying to be invisible in his spot in the corner. “Fitz, do you know who any of us are?”

Fitz looked up at them. He was still shaking even with the blanket and even though he no longer felt cold. “I have no idea who you are or what is happening.”

Dr. Simmons looked back at the team as if to say, “See what I mean?” But she didn’t look pleased to have her theory confirmed. She looked exhausted. And sad.

“What if he doesn’t remember us because the Chronicoms were successful in the past? What if he doesn’t remember us because we failed?” the Director said.

“But we didn’t fail,” said Deke. “We just stopped them again before they jumped here.”

“Fitz,” said Dr. Simmons again, so soft and patient. “You asked before about Hydra. Do you know what that is?”

“No,” said Fitz. “I’ve never heard that word before.” He looked around him at all the unfamiliar faces. He thought he might be sick. “How do you know my name?”

At this point they had taken him to lie down, and they had apparently continued their discussion, deciding that Dr. Simmons was in fact correct. This world was different from their own by more than just a single snipped thread. These time and space travelers had been led into another dimension and had picked him up like a stray dog. Just his luck.

They had talked about dropping him back on the ground but hadn’t been sure if he would be safe. The Chronicoms had seen him with them. They were extremely concerned with his safety for a group of people he had never met. More concerned than his colleagues ever seemed to be. Not the nicest folks in his S.H.I.E.L.D., but the pay was good and the tech he got to play with was out of this world.

He was already drifting into some kind of fitful unconsciousness when they jumped. They told him later that a clock had begun to count down, and there was nothing they could do to stop it. They went when the clock told them to, and they went where the alien ship they were trailing led them. And so they jumped, thinking they were still chasing the evil aliens. But they weren’t.

They appeared in black and open space far from Earth, in another time, in their own dimension. At the side of a Chronicom ship. A ship that was completely empty.

xxx

“They tricked us,” said Agent Coulson for the fiftieth time.

“Yes, we’re all aware.” Daisy fiddled with the ship’s computers, as she always did. Fitz wasn’t sure how someone could have superpowers and be that brilliant with computers. She was definitely taking more than her fair share of the gifts of the universe, that one.

“But they tricked _me_ ,” said Agent Coulson. “And I didn’t even get to make a snarky comeback.” He looked over at Fitz. “That’s kind of my thing.”

“We’ve been over this,” said Daisy. “They took us to that other dimension because your knowledge of history wouldn’t help us there, because you only know our history, and so we were easy to outplay. And they took all their people there and are probably now destroying that S.H.I.E.L.D. and repopulating that Earth with a race of creepy robots. Where we can’t follow or stop them.” Daisy took a handful of cereal from the box beside her. “It’s genius. Terrible and freaky, but genius.”

“Luckily,” said Dr. Simmons, “we collected a genius of our own.” She was looking at Fitz, and he blushed and focused back on the jump drive in front of him.

“But honestly, Simmons, do you think that anyone, even Fitz, can create a way to jump to that dimension? No offense.” Daisy looked over at Fitz, but he didn’t respond. They talked about him when he was in the room all the time, and probably a lot more when he wasn’t in it. He wasn’t used to them, but he was getting used to the confusion he felt around them. Confusion was a familiar friend in this strange place.

“Deke says it’s not even possible,” Daisy continued. “He says it might take months to calibrate the drive just to get us back home, let alone back to that dimension.”

“Deke may be correct, but I’ve worked with time before, Daisy. We can take as much as we need, years if we have to, and then figure out a way to get back there with everything we need to defeat them.”

“Why?” Daisy stood up from her terminal to face Dr. Simmons. “Why are we risking our own lives when we’ve already won?”

“Daisy,” said Dr. Simmons. Fitz had heard this argument repeated over and over in the days since they had brought him aboard. “We haven’t won. The Chronicoms are still out there hurting people.”

“But not our people.” Daisy gestured out the window into the blackness of space. “Our home is safe. We’ve run them out of it. We can go back. Live our lives. You can be with Fitz.”

“Not everyone’s home has been saved, Daisy.” Dr. Simmons threw Fitz a concerned look. She always looked concerned when they brought up the other him. The other him that she wanted to spend her life with, according to the things he’d overheard. “And since when do we not protect innocent people, since when do we only protect our own?”

Daisy sighed and collapsed back into her seat. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s right. I just want this to be over.”

“It will be over. It’s just going to take more time.”

“How much?” asked Daisy throwing her hands in the air.

“As long as it takes. We’ll work and we’ll work and we’ll figure something out. Eventually we—”

“Done,” said Fitz. He put the multitool Deke had loaned him down. “It’s done.”

“What’s done?” asked Daisy.

“The jump drive.” All three of them—Daisy, Agent Coulson, and Dr. Simmons—stared at him in shock, like he had just announced he was a monkey and started doing a jig.

Dr. Simmons spoke. “The jump drive is—”

“Finished.” They still didn’t respond. “It should get us back to my dimension.”

Still nothing.

“You said you wanted it to work, so I fixed it.” He turned to Daisy. “And I know what you’ve been saying, but we are going back, at least I am. My world may not seem as nice as yours and doesn’t have some of the fun tech you have” he gestured around the plane “and it may not have some of the people you care about” he looked over at Dr. Simmons “but my mum is there. And I am going to protect her. And probably die trying. Unless you help.” He knew his eyes were betraying his fear and his inherent weakness, but his voice was steady. He meant what he said. He was probably going to die, and he didn’t care.

Agent Coulson smiled, the first reaction but shock that any of them had exhibited since Fitz had announced he was finished with the machine. “All right then,” he said. “Let’s go be heroes.”


	2. Chapter 2

“One more time,” said Daisy.

“I told you, I already understand.”

“One more time.”

Fitz gave an exaggerated sigh. “I use my S.H.I.E.L.D. badge to get on the base, then locate the armory, blow out the back wall with this—” he held up a small device of his own design “and wait for extraction.”

“And what do you not do?”

“Anything else?”

Daisy nodded. “Exactly. You do not do a single other thing, you don’t try to be a hero, and you definitely don’t engage with a single Chronicom if you see one. You hide until we find you, understood?”

“Yes, mam.” Fitz was used to taking orders, and he was used to following them. People who stepped out of line or talked back didn’t fare well at his S.H.I.E.L.D. He saw that things were different on this plane (everyone argued all the time, even with the Director), but he guessed that when the real danger struck the leaders would take charge. And they all kept giving him orders, now that he was about to go on mission. It was his first ever field mission, which he had made the mistake of telling them. They were all worried about him. Deke had pulled him aside and tried to show him how to use a gun, before May stopped him and showed them both how to use a gun. At their final meeting before the mission the Director had called him Turbo, and then looked embarrassed, and then looked a little choked up, and then left the room.

“It’s not about you,” said Dr. Simmons. “They’re dealing with their own issues. You’ll be fine.” She was standing beside him at the back of the plane, hovering around him while he put on his parachute. She had insisted on helping him with it, just to make sure he got the straps right, she said.

“You must all really care about him,” he said.

She looked away and twisted the ring on her finger. “He’s a good man.” She turned back to him and smiled. “As are you. And once we’ve got this all sorted we’ll get back to him. It’s all going to work out.” He suspected she was saying this to herself more than him, so he smiled back at her.

“Course it will.” He wasn’t sure why he felt protective of her, but he supposed that it had something to do with how she treated him. He had never met a person and certainly never a woman who seemed so drawn to him, like he was gravity and she was a satellite being pulled into his orbit. The other Fitz must be an exceptional man to inspire such devotion from this woman. And from this team. He didn’t understand how they thought he resembled such a man.

For the mission, he had to parachute to a field outside the base, where there was a nearby impound lot for vehicles commandeered by S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. He would take one of the cars (he had another little device for that, but if all else failed he could always hotwire it) and then drive up to the base, his official badge in hand. He was still a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, but they weren’t certain what the Chronicoms were up to or how many had infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. The team had tracked the aliens to his lab building, which is how they had run into him in the first place. He knew that they could replicate the faces of humans, and so anyone he met might be a Chronicom.

“We need weapons,” said the Director, when they were first planning their attack. “No way we can take out that many robots with what we’ve got on this ship.”

So Fitz had described the armory at the base in the English countryside, and they had agreed to break in. Fitz had never been to the base. He had barely left his lab since graduating from the Academy.

Shockingly, at least to Fitz, the plan seemed to work. He was able to parachute out of the plane and land without dying. (There had been a lot of screaming again, but no one was around to hear him, so he just let loose. He found it almost therapeutic). Then breaking into the lot and stealing the car was no problem. He loved his tech.

There had been a tense moment when he was at the guard station, because he wasn’t on the list of visitors, but then he heard a ding from the guard’s tablet. “You’re good to go. Must have been a delay in the system. Have a good day Agent Fitz.”

“Thank you,” he said. “And thank you Daisy,” he said as he drove away.

“Don’t mention it,” he heard her say in his earpiece.

He found the building he wanted and parked the car. He was able to enter with his badge, and he began searching for the armory among long grey hallways of locked doors. That’s why they had to send him in to scout—they had no idea where the armory was and not much time to search once they flew a giant plane into the place.

Everything was going so well, he thought. It was even believable that an agent of his type would be looking for the armory, since he was a tech expert. He really didn’t know what he had been afraid of, going into the field.

He was just about to stop and ask a passing agent to point him in the right direction when he saw a figure that looked vaguely familiar talking to an agent at the end of the hall. Her back was to him, but she had dark hair, and something about the way she gestured with her hand—he couldn’t put his finger on how, but he knew her. He started to turn and head the other direction: if someone recognized him he would have a lot of explaining to do. But then the woman finished her conversation, turned around, and headed toward him. He froze where he stood. They made eye contact. There could be no doubt, not just because of her appearance but because of the butterflies he felt in his stomach every time he looked at her. It was Dr. Jemma Simmons.

“Hey, stop!” called a voice from the other end of the hallway. Dr. Simmons was near him now, and he gasped as she pulled a tiny pistol from her pocket and pointed it at his side.

“Stay calm and everything will be fine,” she said. She grabbed his arm, hiding the gun she was digging into his ribs underneath it, and began to drag him with her. “We’ll just be on our way,” she called over her shoulder.

“But—”

“I found who I was looking for. Agent—” She poked Fitz with the gun.

“Fitz,” he said.

“Agent Fitz and I need to discuss some things. Privately.”

“Yes, mam. Agent. Mam,” said the man’s voice behind them. Fitz couldn’t see the man’s face, but he sounded confused. Please be confused enough to sound an alarm, he thought.

Dr. Simmons was stronger than she looked and kept a vice-grip on his arm. She seemed to know exactly where she was headed, and she was determined to take him with her. She was doing an excellent job of concealing the gun from the agents they passed, but he could feel her tremble every time one of them looked at her.

“Do you have a badge?” she asked, as they came to a hallway with only one door. 

“Yes,” he said.

“Use it,” she said, as soon as the hallway was clear. She gestured with her gun toward the wall panel beside the door and glanced behind them.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Open the door,” she said, pointing the gun back at him. He did as he was told.

“Fitz.” He heard Daisy’s voice in his ear. She had been asking him what was happening in an increasingly concerned voice since his abduction. He didn’t really want to say anything that might alarm the beautiful woman with the gun, however.

“There, I’ve opened the door for you. Now please stop pointing a gun at me and let me go.” He hoped this would get the message across to everyone involved.

“Get inside,” said Dr. Simmons.

Fitz stepped through the door and into an enormous room lined with shelving and large crates. Every surface was covered with weaponry, some of which he recognized from his own designs.

“Why have you taken me _to the armory_?” He heard muffled voices over his earpiece.

“Brilliant,” said Dr. Simmons. She exhaled, as though she were relieved, and gazed around the room. “Now, I just need to find what I’m looking for.”

“And what is that?” Fitz was keeping his eyes on her but backing away slowly toward one of the shelves with guns.

She noticed his movements and pointed her little gun back at him. “Stop that. I need your help. Tell me about these weapons.”

“What do you want to know?”

“There’s a particular one, I don’t know what you call it and I’m not sure what it looks like intact. It was used—” she paused. “I’ve seen the aftermath, what it does. It’s got a unique capacitor component that I’ve never seen used before, so I could ID it from that. But I don’t have time to take things apart.”

“Capacitor?”

Dr. Simmons rolled her eyes. “It has to do with electric charge. When certain materials are placed in an electric field, the surrounding electrons—”

“Are you seriously explaining dialectric polarization to me?” asked Fitz.

She narrowed her eyes. “Who are you?”

“I told you: I’m Fitz. Who are _you_?”

She seemed unsure of what to say, or if she should say anything at all, but then she said, “Sharon Carter. _Agent_ Sharon Carter.”

“Sharon Carter?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Simmons, lifting her chin in defiance.

“She’s American. And blonde.”

“Yes well I know that. I didn’t have a lot of time or resources, all right? Just tell me where to find what I need.”

“Who are you really?”

“I’m not telling you. You’re one of _them_.”

“Well you’re clearly one of _them_ ,” he said.

“I’m part of the Resistance,” she said, just as he said, “you’re a Chronicom.”

“What?” they said in unison.

“What’s a Chronicom?”

“What Resistance?”

“The Resistance to S.H.I.E.L.D. And all of the atrocities for which you are responsible.”

“An android from space bent on taking over this planet. Wait, what atrocities?”

“An alien android? You think I’m an alien android. Are you insane?”

Fitz paused so they would no longer be talking over one another. “What atrocities?” he said again.

A look of pain flitted over her face, but she took a deep breath and plastered on an aggressive smile. (The English, masters of repression, he thought.) “None of your concern. I’m not here to listen to your crazy distractions or answer your questions. I have a job to do.”

She waved the gun in his direction as though to remind him that she still had it. “Now, tell me about these weapons.”

Before he could open his mouth, he heard a voice in his ear. “Fire in the hole, Fitz.”

He braced himself just as an explosion took out the back wall of the room, sending concrete and weapons flying. Dr. Simmons’s hands flew up to protect herself from debris, and he jumped backwards, grabbing a gun from the shelf behind him. He pointed it at her just as the dust began to clear from the enormous hole. Daisy stood there as the debris settled, her arm outstretched.

“You ok, Fitz?” she called as she ran toward him. May and Yo-Yo rushed in after her.

He took the gun from Dr. Simmons as the others grabbed and cuffed her. “Never better,” he said.

xxx

“Could this get any weirder?” asked Daisy. She was leaning against a lab station on the Zephyr, staring at Dr. Simmons. The second Dr. Simmons.

“My name is Jemma,” the other Dr. Simmons was saying. She had finally started talking, after an hour of glaring in silence. They had tried to tell her they meant no harm and had offered her water which she refused to drink. Fitz admired her courage; he certainly had not been this tough when abducted by space/time/dimension travelers.

She had finally broken when she saw herself walk into the room. Dr. Simmons had come in and sat next to her with a plate of food.

“Eat something,” she had said, a tired but ever-patient smile on her face. Weren’t they the kindest woman, he thought.

It had taken Jemma (he decided he would call this other version of her Jemma, as she wasn’t his boss and two Dr. Simmons was confusing) several minutes of questions to determine what they were doing and who this other her was. Space travelers from another dimension and one wearing her face—it was a lot to process. He was glad they hadn’t brought his own doppelganger along.

Once she finally seemed to believe them and grasp what was happening (and once she had taken some food and water), she had begun to tell them about herself and why she was on the base. She seemed excited to learn that they had taken most of the weapons they could grab from the armory.

“All of them? I was just hoping to be able to sneak out one weapon. Imagine what I could do with all of them!”

She seemed pretty excited about stealing from S.H.I.E.L.D., and the Director and Daisy exchanged worried looks.

“I am imagining that. Which is why I have you locked up on my plane.”

Jemma shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. It sounds like this S.H.I.E.L.D.,” she gestured to the plane and to the team, most of whom were gathered around the lab, “is actually trying to do good things. Coming all the way to another dimension to save people. Stealing from the evil to help the good.”

“No, now,” said the Director. “S.H.I.E.L.D. is not evil. And we are S.H.I.E.L.D., so we’re not stealing, just…borrowing our own stuff.”

“There’s nothing wrong with stealing weapons from the bad guys,” said Yo-Yo. The Director raised his eyebrows. “What? Have you forgotten how you first met me? I was this woman; I am this woman.” Yo-Yo pointed at Jemma, who smiled.

“I like how you think,” she said.

“What proof do you have that S.H.I.E.L.D. is evil?” asked May.

Jemma reached into the collar of her shirt and pulled out a chain she wore around her neck. On the chain was a piece of twisted metal, with the words S.H.I.E.L.D. engraved into it. “This is all the proof I need.”

Everyone seemed to be waiting for her to speak, so she continued. “My lab, my entire lab, all of my colleagues, the people I considered friends, were murdered when this weapon detonated. Murdered by S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“That’s a pretty big accusation,” said Agent Coulson. “How do you know it was S.H.I.E.L.D.? People steal and use our tech. _We_ just stole our tech.”

“We were working on a project that they didn’t like, a cure for a bioweapon. I had been called in for questioning at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters as the head of the lab, which is the only reason I wasn’t there that day. And when I returned.” She cast her eyes down. When she spoke again it was clear she was holding back tears. “They used the same bioweapon on my people that we had been trying to cure. A gruesome death. It was a message. They blew up the lab to hide the evidence, but I found this in the wreckage.” Jemma hid her necklace back under her collar.

“And then,” her voice grew bitter, “they came to me and offered me a job. A job I couldn’t refuse, that type of thing.”

She looked up now, a blazing fire in her eyes. “And so I ran. I found the Resistance, and now I’m doing whatever I can to help them. To end S.H.I.E.L.D.”

No one seemed to know what to say as they processed this information. Then Deke spoke up.

“Bioweapons? Is that something S.H.I.E.L.D. uses?”

“Not our S.H.I.E.L.D.” said the Director.

“He would know,” said Jemma. She was looking right at Fitz. From the look on her face he realized that she might hate him. “You say he builds weapons for them.”

Suddenly everyone was looking at Fitz, which he didn’t enjoy. “I don’t know about any bioweapons. I just build what they tell me and solve the problems they give me. Just pieces of things; they never give me the whole project. That’s not how it works.” He looked at Jemma’s beautiful and angry face. “They told us the stories about a bioweapon were just rumors, spread by the Resistance.”

“And you never questioned any of that? Sounds pretty shady,” said Daisy.

“I keep my head down and do my job. That’s what we all have to do. You heard what happened to her.” He pointed at Jemma, who huffed.

“I wouldn’t let them control me. I ran.”

“Well maybe I’m not as brave as you.” Fitz was angry and then he wasn’t, he was just sad. “I just wanted to live a normal life, have a job, and take care of my mum. I don’t want to be a hero or to fight. I don’t think I’m made that way.”

“You’re made for more than you know,” said Dr. Simmons. It was the only thing she’d said since the meeting began.

“Good people doing nothing is what keeps injustice alive,” said Jemma.

“And what about actively working for the bad guys? Cause that seems more like what he’s doing,” said Deke.

“You’re one to talk, Mister ‘I Play the Long Game,’” said Daisy.

“I’m not judging him. I grew up in a world like this. You do what you have to do to survive.” Deke looked at Fitz. “I get it.”

“All right, we’re losing focus,” said the Director. “We’re here to end the Chronicoms, not get into local politics.”

“It would help to know the local players, though, before we enter the fight,” said Daisy. “Maybe the top brass doesn’t know this kind of stuff is happening. Maybe it’s like in our dimension, and Hydra has infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“Hydra?” asked Jemma.

“Yeah, I don’t know it either,” said Fitz.

“Maybe we can go to S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, talk to the Director. You would help,” Daisy said to the Director.

“Or if Mack’s evil here we would have a much bigger problem on our hands.” Deke gestured to the Director’s enormous frame. “Like, literally.”

“This is reminding me way too much of the Framework,” said May.

“But maybe we can get the Director’s help. I just can’t believe that all of S.H.I.E.L.D. is evil,” said Daisy.

Fitz snorted, he couldn’t help it. “You’re talking about Director Malick? He’s not going to help you.”

“’Director Malick?’ As in Gideon Malick? The grand wizard of evil?” said Daisy.

Jemma shrugged. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

Agent Coulson looked around the room at the team’s stunned faces. “Oh, so it’s that kind of dimension.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This alternate dimension turned out way more like the Framework than I had intended, so I had May point it out. She'd know all about the Framework.


	3. Chapter 3

Fitz wasn’t sure why he had to be in the lab with Jemma alone. Certainly the team was around somewhere; this was a small plane for this many people—where the hell were they?

Out on missions, he supposed. They had been doing reconnaissance, checking on leads and getting themselves in and out of scrapes for the past couple days. It seemed like these people could never be in enough danger or bizarre situations; they seemed to feed off them. They talked often about how much they wanted to get home, have a burger, ride a motorcycle. He thought they could all use a heavy dose of therapy and a nap on a beach. Possibly even a good memory wipe, after all this trauma.

The Director had decided that Fitz and Jemma would stay on the Zephyr and work in the lab. Fitz was now wanted for questioning regarding the armory break-in and the fact that he hadn’t been at his job in a couple weeks. Jemma was already being hunted by S.H.I.E.L.D., so they thought it best to keep her hidden.

There had still been some questions as to her motives in the armory break-in. What exactly had she been needing a bomb for? Especially a bioweapon?

“To continue my research,” she told them. “We were so close to a cure. If I can finish that work, perhaps no one else will have to suffer like my colleagues did.” She looked down at her hands, and Fitz thought that she looked unsure of herself for the first time since he’d met her. “I’m not an agent or a fighter; I’m not able to kill people with my bare hands or whatever it is you do. I barely even know how to shoot a gun. But science is something that I know. That’s how I can help.”

Fitz knew exactly what she meant; he was a scientist on a team of superheroes. Sometimes when she spoke it felt like she was speaking his thoughts out loud. It was unsettling. It was even more unsettling to realize that he quite liked it.

The team had been shocked to discover that there were no non-lethal weapons among what they had stolen from the S.H.I.E.L.D. base.

“Where are the I.C.E.R.s?” asked Agent Coulson.

“The what?”

“The guns with rounds that incapacitate, not kill.”

Fitz was stunned. “We don’t have anything like that at S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Daisy had shaken her head in Mack’s direction. “It just _is_ Hydra, isn’t it?” The team had some theory that in this dimension an evil group named Hydra hadn’t infiltrated S.H.I.E.L.D. so much as taken it over and been running it for years. He didn’t know what a better S.H.I.E.L.D. would look like—this was all he knew. In his world, you either gave in to the fear by doing what was expected of you or you didn’t and lived a much shorter life. He guessed he’d chosen to die bravely now. At least he had some savings set aside, something for his mum.

“I did have a preliminary design for a weapon like that, but my superiors chose not to move forward with it. They didn’t think it had a use,” Fitz said.

“An I.C.E.R.?”

“Actually, I called it the Night-Night gun, but yeah, it was meant to stop people without killing them.”

Jemma snorted from her seat on top of a weapons crate.

“What?” asked Fitz.

“The ‘Night-Night gun?’ No wonder they didn’t take it seriously.”

“Do you think that you two could work together and get that design operational? Maybe retrofit some of these guns we stole?” Mack gestured to the enormous pile of guns they had in the hangar.

Jemma frowned. She had barely made eye contact with Fitz except to glare at him; he didn’t think she was going to be pleasant to work with. “I suppose I can. If nothing else I can keep an eye on him for you.” She seemed to be under the impression Fitz was about to bolt or betray them at any moment, since he was a low-down dirty S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. “If he tries to run, I’ll gut him like a fish.”

“Cool,” said Fitz. “This is going to be a lot of fun for me.”

“How about you just give us a call when you’re done and not do any gutting, ok Simmons?” She nodded but made sure to give Fitz a little side-eye glare. She stood up and headed in the direction of the lab.

“You coming, or do I have to get my pistol?” she called over her shoulder at Fitz.

“This Simmons is kind of feral,” the Director said.

Daisy smiled. “I like it.”

Now that they were in the lab, Fitz was having trouble concentrating. He kept looking at her profile, so sharp and delicate. Could she really gut him like a fish? He was at once terrified and…ok, was it wrong that he found her threats the slightest bit attractive?

“Is this the size of the chamber for the paralyzing agent?” She was scanning his design. The team had gone to his apartment and taken his laptop and all of his backup files—files he wasn’t really supposed to be keeping on a drive at home, but it was his work, wasn’t it?

He nodded, and she rolled her eyes. “How on Earth do you expect me to be able to create instant paralysis with this? Even if I find the right toxin, one drop won’t be enough.”

“One drop? Is that a scientific measurement? And I have to get the thing to move at high velocity and break up on impact; you try it. We’re not chucking bloody water balloons at people.”

They continued to argue in this way, teasing out the problems with the design while insulting and testing one another. Fitz learned that she was a brilliant scientist, possibly even smarter than him, if he was willing to admit it. In one tense moment she had accused him of believing in the power of magic to make his design work (“do you think you’re Remus bloody-Lupin?”), and he had gritted his teeth and said with complete seriousness, “You take that back.” She had, and she’d even looked a little chagrined. Threaten to dissect him, fine, but bring talk of magic into his lab? Not a chance.

After a few hours, they hadn’t come to actual blows (and his gut remained intact), but they weren’t any closer to finding a solution. The Director had come in after another mission (during which the team had narrowly escaped death—again) to check on their progress, Agent Coulson at his side.

“I need you to figure this out. An all-out war is coming, and I want to limit the casualties as much as possible.”

“Hey, I’ve got this,” said Agent Coulson. He turned to Fitz and Jemma and started to yell. “Don’t ever tell me there’s no way. It’s on you. Get it done.”

Fitz, Jemma, and the Director stared at him with wide eyes.

“Too much? It worked last time.”

The Director cleared his throat. “Coulson is right—this is on you. Lives are on the line, and you’re our best minds.” He tugged at Agent Coulson’s arm, and they left the lab.

“Sort of good cop, bad cop, right? I think we nailed it,” Fitz heard Agent Coulson saying.

Jemma turned to Fitz. “Do you have any idea what’s going on with these people?”

“Not a clue,” he said. At least they had that in common.

xxx

Fitz had occasionally noticed Dr. Simmons watching them work from outside the glass walls of the lab, always with a small smile on her face. Now that he and Jemma had reached a new impasse resulting in her storming off to the loo, he snuck out of the lab and approached the terminal where Dr. Simmons was working.

“Excuse me, mam?”

Dr. Simmons covered whatever she was working on and turned to him. Unlike the she-devil he’d been sparring with in the lab, this woman was always warm and kind. He’d never had a supervisor like her at his S.H.I.E.L.D.

“Yes, Fitz?”

“I had a thought—there are already these incapacitating weapons, these I.C.E.R.s in your world, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And, from what everyone is saying, I’m assuming it was you and the other me—the other Fitz—who designed them?”

Half of Dr. Simmons’s mouth ticked up in a smile, but her eyes remained sad, as they always did. “Yes. We made them years ago.”

“So, correct me if I’m wrong, but you could come in there and sort out the problem straight away, couldn’t you?”

She sighed. “Honestly, yes. But I’ve enjoyed watching you two work. It’s so sweet.”

_Sweet_? Perhaps that word meant something different in her dimension? Jemma had just told him that his “thoughts were a bloody mess” and that clearly “genius is one tick away from madness.” He hadn’t found that to be sweet at all. At least she had acknowledged his genius. He was underappreciated in this arena.

“She hates me,” he said.

Dr. Simmons laughed. “She finds you irritating, for sure. It’s difficult when you’ve never been challenged by a mind at your level before.” He could tell she spoke from experience. “She doesn’t trust you. Not yet.”

“I know,” he said. “I was in S.H.I.E.L.D. She’s right about them being bad, and the way I know is that when she told us what happened to her lab I didn’t doubt her for a second. I wasn’t even surprised. I’d been pretending like everything was fine so I could get through the days, so I could keep my job. But I knew it was wrong. And I did it anyway.”

Fitz felt so ashamed, so weak, just like his father had always told him he was before he abandoned them. He didn’t know why he was telling the most perfect woman he’d ever met about the worst part of himself, but he knew, just as innately as he knew that he had been working all along for the bad guys, that she wouldn’t judge him.

“Perhaps you two just need more time. It took my Fitz and I years to—”

“Dendrotoxin!” Jemma was running toward him, her eyes excited. “I’ve only just realized; that’s the substance we need. I worked with it in my lab—in small doses it paralyzes.”

“Yeah it might. We—I mean S.H.I.E.L.D—uses it in large doses to kill instantly.” Jemma narrowed her eyes at him. “So there’s probably some in the weapons we stole, is what I mean.”

“Lead the way then,” she said. She was still glaring at him.

“Good luck,” said Dr. Simmons, who was watching them like a fond parent. “Excellent work!”

“What is with her—me—the one that has my face?” asked Jemma as they made their way to the stacks of weapons in the hangar. “The way she looks at us. And the way she looks at you.”

Fitz shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“Like you’re water, and she’s a woman dying of thirst.”

Fitz could feel an embarrassed flush rising to his cheeks. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“A thirst trap.” Jemma grinned. “I think she might have a crush on you, the other me.”

Fitz rolled his eyes and took the lid off one of the stolen crates. “Not me. In her dimension there’s another me, and I think the two of them are…” He busied himself in the crate so that he wouldn’t have to finish his sentence. Or make eye contact with her.

“Are what?” she said. “Are a couple?”

He stood back up, now holding a spherical device the size of a grapefruit in his hand. “I think so,” he said. “They’ve never come right out and said it, but I think she misses him. And not in a just-friends kind of way.” He held the device out to her.

“Is this the one with the dendrotoxin?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “This is the one that you were looking for.” He scanned her face for a reaction. “When you broke onto the base.” _The one that killed your friends_ , he thought, but he didn’t want to say it when she had guns so close at hand.

Jemma stared at the device but didn’t move to touch it. “How do you know?”

“Because,” he said, placing it gingerly on top of the crate beside them, “I helped design it.”

Jemma said nothing. She looked at him in silence, and he didn’t know her well enough to know if the look on her face said she was disappointed or about to murder him.

“I knew when you showed us your necklace.” He gestured toward her throat. “I didn’t know it was a bioweapon they were making; I only worked on the trigger component. They didn’t tell me what was meant to go inside the device. Or what they were using it for.”

He wasn’t sure why he was telling her this, just as he hadn’t known why he was revealing his shame to another woman with the same amber eyes only a few moments before. She wasn’t looking at him with heart eyes like Dr. Simmons had, and he didn’t know if Jemma would ever trust him the way that the other woman seemed to. But he couldn’t stop himself from wanting her to.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry that I helped them do it and that I didn’t question what I knew in my heart was wrong.” He picked up the small device and held it out to her again. “And I’d like to fix it. I’d like to help you figure out the cure.”

Jemma looked at the device for a long moment before she took it from him. She raised it to eye-level.

“You say in another dimension we’re a couple?” she said.

He didn’t know how to respond.

“I don’t see it,” she said.

She looked up from the device and into his eyes. “But if you want to help me, I’ll take the help.” She turned and began making her way back toward the lab. “And grab some of the dendrotoxin,” she called. “We’ve got work to do.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Since they didn't grow up together, this Fitz didn't have a bold Simmons to break him out of his awkward, shy shell or get him out of the lab, and this Simmons didn't have a sweet Fitz to soften her sharper edges. Perhaps they'll be a good influence on one another now...(hint hint).


	4. Chapter 4

Jemma didn’t speak to him much once they began working in earnest. There was no more arguing, but that was more because she barely acknowledged his existence than because they’d made a truce. She seemed to respect his ideas and scientific judgement, so that was something.

By the time they had a working prototype for an incapacitating weapon, the Director was rounding them all up for a conference in the comms area. Fitz had a clear view of Jemma’s face, though he stood on the opposite side of the room.

“It’s time,” the Director was saying. “We’ve nailed down a plan with the Resistance, and we’re going in tonight.” Jemma had connected the team with some of her Resistance contacts, and they had spent the last week gaining the group’s trust and gathering other intel and supplies for an assault on the Chronicoms. Fitz didn’t know how a war could be planned in a few days, but then probably other people couldn’t design a weapon in a few days, so he guessed they all had their skills.

The plan was to infiltrate the Chronicom headquarters, which the team had discovered with not a little effort. The aliens had established themselves seamlessly into S.H.I.E.L.D., and there was some speculation that Malick or other top operatives were collaborating with them. This was the reason that the Resistance was willing to help them; the agreement was to deal a blow to both Chronicoms and S.H.I.E.L.D. in one fell swoop.

Daisy asked about weapons, and Fitz supplied that he and Jemma had completed the new I.C.E.R. design and were working on something else. “It’s a cure for the—”

“It’s something to help,” said Jemma. “We’ll tell you more when we’ve finished.”

If the Director could tell that she was keeping something from them he said nothing about it. “Good work agents. You know your assignments; let’s get to work.”

The meeting broke up, and Fitz followed Jemma, who was headed back to the lab. “Hey,” he said. “Why’d you cut me off?”

She shook her head and glanced at the other agents. He waited until they were alone in the lab to speak again. “Jemma—”

“It’s none of their business,” she said. “I’m curing this bioweapon; I’m saving my own people. I don’t need S.H.I.E.L.D, from this dimension or any other, messing it up again for me.”

She had her back to him and was hunched over her lab station. His hand moved of its own volition toward her, but he pulled it back.

“They’re trying to help. We’re all trying to help,” he said.

“Fine, but I don’t work for them.” She spun around to face him. “And I don’t work with you. When whatever they’re planning is done, I’m going back to fighting S.H.I.E.L.D. my way.”

“Which is?”

“What?”

“What is your way? What are you doing to fight them?”

“I work alone. I help the Resistance, get them what they need, but I work alone.”

“What about with science? Together we’ve done twice the work I could normally do and in half the time.”

“That sounds like your own inefficiency. I have no such issues.” She was being obstinate, but Fitz could tell she was lying. Even with the arguing and the silent treatment, these few short days had been the greatest and most productive collaborative work experience of his life. She matched him in brilliance, but she also filled in the gaps in his knowledge and buttressed his weaknesses. He knew she felt it too, especially with her trying so hard to hide it.

“I want to tell you something,” he said. She crossed her arms and scowled at him. He almost laughed. She was so stubborn and angry all the time, none of which suited her. She was like an actor wearing the wrong costume; sour just wasn’t the right expression for that lovely face.

“After this is over—assuming I survive, which isn’t in any way certain—I’d like to help you. I can do things for the Resistance, whatever you need. If you’d like my help in the lab, you can have me.” Jemma raised her eyebrows. “Have my scientific expertise, I mean.”

“Nana, Bobo.” Deke called from the lab doorway. They both gave him a confused look. “Sorry, Fitz and Simmons. You just look so much like my grandparents. I finished outfitting most of the guns with the new I.C.E.R. design. A cartridge you can add to any gun? Genius. Of course, what else would I expect from the FitzSimmons brain trust?”

Neither of them responded, so he said, “Mack says gear up, wheels up in ten.” He left them, probably to go annoy someone else.

Jemma turned to Fitz. “ _’FitzSimmons?_ ’”

He was surprised that this was the part that had confused her. He was more fixated on the grandparents thing. “Yeah, I’m not sure he’s all there.”

They “geared up,” which for Fitz meant putting on some black clothes and body armor and taking deep breaths while staring in the mirror of the loo. “You can do this,” he told himself. “You have to do something to make up for the damage you’ve done. And it may as well be this.” It wasn’t the most rousing speech, but then he knew for a fact that he was about to die. He had never been in any kind of fire fight, except the time these people had dragged him from his lab, and then he had mostly screamed and ran. He was ready to die, he supposed, although he wasn’t thrilled about it.

Jemma was pacing in the hallway when he stepped out of the loo. “Sorry, did I take too long?” he asked.

“What?” she asked. She seemed distracted. “No, no I wasn’t waiting.” She was dressed in the same tactical gear as him, all black from head to toe. She looked so small.

“Nervous?” he asked.

She started to shake her head and then faltered. “Never done anything like this,” she said without making eye contact.

“Neither have I.”

“They all seem so sure of themselves. I have no idea what’s happening.”

“We’ll stick together,” he said. “They said they just need us to upload the virus into their main computer terminal. They’ll do all the shooting. Easy.”

She nodded, still looking at her feet. “Easy.”

He realized that he wasn’t happy about the prospect that he might die, but he was terrified that anything might happen to her. He could do his best to protect her. That could be the good he did in his final moments.

“Fitz,” she said. She was playing with the strap on her bullet-proof vest. “I wanted you to know that I wouldn’t have gutted you.”

“Sorry?”

“When I said I would harm you when we first met. That was all talk. To seem tough. I’ve never hurt anyone or even been in combat. I’ve only been with the Resistance a couple months.”

“Well, you were well-terrifying,” he said. “I was certain you were going to slice me to pieces.”

“I do excel at dissections,” she said.

“That’s the spirit. I’m sure you could gut a human properly, given some time.”

She smiled at him. For the very first time since he’d met her, her face looked complete. “Thanks,” she said.

“No problem,” he said. “Now let’s go try to avoid dying, yeah?”

xxx

Fitz wasn’t even certain which exit they had come in, let alone which exit was the one the team had told them would be clear for their escape. Perhaps he should have paid more attention during the meeting. He had spent most of it staring at the side of Jemma’s face and wondering what she was thinking.

Another bullet whizzed by his head, and he ducked back down behind one of the metal tables they had flipped to shield themselves. “No idea how to get out. They seem to be coming from all sides.”

Fitz and Jemma were in the room housing the main computer terminal of the S.H.I.E.L.D. base the Chronicoms were using. The room was a sort of circular command station, with computers set up in the center and doors all around. The power had been cut, so the only lights were from the flares they had thrown around the room as they entered. A stray bullet hit the wiring in the ceiling above them, sending a cascade of sparks down on Jemma, who covered her head.

“At least we got the virus uploaded before they found us,” she said. “We did our jobs. The Chronicoms shouldn’t be able to communicate.”

Fitz checked the number of I.C.E.R. rounds he had left. Not enough. “They shouldn’t be able to do anything; the virus was meant to infiltrate their central computer and then spread out to all of them. They’re all bloody computers.” Another blast dented the metal table just behind his head. “So why are we still under attack?”

“I don’t think it’s just the Chronicoms,” said Jemma. She popped up from her hiding spot and shot in the direction of the last bullet before ducking back down. “This is S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Fighting his own colleagues. He had always been comforted by the fact that he was surrounded by heavily armed and trained operatives, since he had no real physical strength and couldn’t even pass his field assessment. Now he was regretting many of his life choices, especially allowing others to fight his battles for him.

“Weren’t they supposed to retrieve us?” Jemma asked. She was looking brave, but he detected panic in her voice. He probably wasn’t the only one with regrets at this point.

“That was the plan, but maybe they’ve been pinned down as well. Things keep going wrong.” Things had gone sideways since the moment they entered the airspace above the base. Somehow, despite all their precautions, the Chronicoms had known they were coming, so they had lost the advantage of surprise. The Director had ordered them to continue with the mission regardless, as they couldn’t abandon the Resistance team who were already under fire on the ground.

Fitz had never witnessed anything as mesmerizing and terrifying as Daisy and May clearing a path for them as they entered the base. A two-woman wrecking crew.

The team had split up to accomplish their individual tasks. The others were supposed to be doing things that took out the Chronicons and kept he and Jemma safe long enough to do their work, but he wished that one of them had decided to keep them safe by actually coming with them.

“There’s too many of them,” said Jemma. “I don’t think we’ll be able to keep them at bay much longer.”

Fitz peeked out from below a table just long enough to fire two rounds at an open door, one of which hit its mark. He heard a muffled shout followed by the thud of a collapsing agent. In the dim light he didn’t see any more movement from the doorway.

“Jemma, I think there might be an exit that’s clear. I don’t know how we’ll both get to it, but maybe I can cover you—”

It was at this point that Fitz regretted that he had never studied the art of being under siege. Never focus forward when there are assailants at your back, would probably have been a lesson he would have learned.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw a figure creep up behind one of their tables, their gun pointed at the back of Jemma’s head.

“No!” Fitz jumped up and forward, doing his best to physically block them. The agent, wearing the S.H.I.E.L.D. insignia on their helmet, raised their gun up from where it had been pointed at Jemma and fired into Fitz’s chest.

The force from the gunshot threw him back into one of their tables. His chest felt like it was splintering into pieces. Dying hurt.

He heard two quick gunshots, and though they were close they sounded like they were down a long tunnel. He must be going into shock. 

Jemma leaned over him and grabbed his hand. “Fitz? Fitz!”

“Tell my mother’s cat I love him,” he said. He found it difficult to breath with the sharp pain in his chest.

“Tell him yourself, although I doubt he’ll care, if he’s anything like every other cat I’ve known.”

Fitz frowned. How insensitive. He had just taken a bullet for this woman. “Not funny, Jemma.”

“You’re wearing a bullet-proof vest, you ridiculous man. You’ve probably just got some broken ribs.” She left his view for a moment, and he heard more gunshots. Then he could see her face hovering over him again.

“Mm not ridiculous,” he said. “I saved your life.” His words sounded slurred and far away. He _was_ going into shock, even if he wasn’t quite dying.

“You rushed at an armed agent waving your arms and yelling ‘no’ when you could have just shot them. That’s ridiculous.”

“I panicked.” Anyway, she hadn’t seen how close the agent had been to her and how they had a gun pointed right at her head. He didn’t trust his own aim in a moment like that. At least that’s what he was prepared to tell people.

She was inspecting his chest, running her hands over the metal plating of the vest. She looked into his face and smiled. “Ridiculous or no, you did save my life.”

“You’re welcome.”

She rolled her eyes. “I didn’t thank you, but I’ll just do it by saving yours back, shall I?” She took the gun he had dropped and shot again into the darkness.

“Where’s your gun?” he asked.

“Out of rounds,” she said. That was not good. “Do you think you can stand?”

He tried to move his torso and cried out from pain. White streaks clouded his vision and he tasted something bitter in his mouth. “That’s a no,” he said, or he tried to say. His mouth was full of marbles.

“Fitz, are you losing consciousness?” Jemma’s face was looking blurry around the edges. He thought it was from the cloudiness in his head, but the entire world seemed to be moving. His body shook, shooting pain down his chest and into his legs.

“Is that an earthquake?” asked Jemma. She looked up and an excited grin flooded her face, just as his vision turned to black. The last sound he heard were the words, “you guys ready to blow this popsicle stand?”

xxx

When Fitz woke he was lying in a clear tube with glowing panels on its side. It took a moment for his mind to adjust, to remember what had happened, and he groaned as he tried to sit. The face of Dr. Simmons popped into frame above him.

“No need to move. Just lie back and relax. We’re healing your injuries.”

He stretched back out, wincing as the movement jostled his rib cage. “What’s happened? Did everyone make it out ok?”

She smiled, apparently pleased that he’d think of others before himself. Always thinking the best of him, Dr. Simmons. What she didn’t know is that there was only one other person about whom he was concerned. Except, he realized, she probably did know that.

“All fine. Some scrapes and bruises, but the worst was your broken ribs and cracked sternum. Lucky you didn’t puncture a lung, leaping in front of a bullet like that.”

“Or die,” he said. He coughed and wow was that a bad idea.

“Yes, you’re going to feel discomfort for some time. I can help speed up the process, but it will take time to heal.”

“When can I get out of this damn pod?” He didn’t like being trapped in a tube. And he didn’t like feeling unwell. And he needed to visit the loo.

“When we say so,” said the same voice. Jemma peered over Dr. Simmons’s shoulder, a stern look on her face. Now that they were side by side, he studied the differences between them. He could easily tell them apart, although he couldn’t easily explain why. Dr. Simmons’s face had more lines; he thought perhaps she was slightly older. Also she was quick to smile but had a deep sadness in her eyes, like she had a wound that wouldn’t heal.

“I have to go to the loo,” he said. There may have been a slight tinge of a whine in his tone.

Jemma tapped the glass, “Shoosh you.” She glanced over at Dr. Simmons. “Can’t you sedate him or something?”

“Yes, that’s probably best,” she said.

“No, no, not best!” he said, but she had tapped something on the pod, and he was already feeling drowsy. “Not fair,” he said.

“Just sleep for a bit longer while we finish up,” said Dr. Simmons. “You’ll be better for it I promise.” She turned to Jemma. “I warned you—he’s a baby when he’s ill.”

When he next woke, he was in his own tiny bunk, a blanket over him. Who had tucked him in, he wondered?

After finally visiting the loo, he decided to stretch his aching limbs by walking to the lab. Any movement of his chest was painful, and taking a deep breath felt like being stabbed with a knife, but he could tell that he felt marginally better from when he was first shot and even from the time he was conscious inside the pod. Space people on a spaceship from another dimension who could heal injuries in hours. He was in an episode of Doctor Who.

He was surprised to hear voices coming from the lab. It sounded like the entire team was having a meeting. So many meetings. They discussed everything, this S.H.I.E.L.D. team. Group discussions weren’t really a thing in his S.H.I.E.L.D.; it was more—do what you’re told and you won’t get hauled in for questioning. He guessed he could endure a few long meetings if it meant an end to the nightmare that was his S.H.I.E.L.D.

“I’m telling you,” Jemma was saying, “there’s no way it was him. I spent nearly every moment leading up to and during the battle with him, and I never saw him contact anyone. He’s on our side. He jumped in front of a bullet for me, for goodness sake.”

Fitz stopped. He was just out of view of the lab and had been walking toward the voices. They were talking about him. What were they accusing him of? What was Jemma defending him from?

“I’m not saying it was him,” he heard the Director say. “I’m saying that we need to come at this from every angle and not let our emotions cloud our judgement. This Fitz isn’t our Fitz, and we don’t know what he’s capable of.”

“I don’t know any other Fitz—I only know this one. And I trust him. And my emotions aren’t clouding my judgement; they never do.” Fitz could hear in Jemma’s voice that she was doing that thing where she said something more to convince herself than because it was true. It was endearing.

“For what it’s worth,” said Daisy, “I don’t think he did it either. I checked all the data streams going to and from the ship since he got on board, and there’s no message. I just don’t know how he could have sent anything to S.H.I.E.L.D.”

Oh, they thought he was a spying on them. Not good.

“Deke, you pull anything off the cameras?”

“No, and I would like to state again for the record—”

“There is no record,” said Yo-yo. “No one is keeping a record of this conversation.”

“ _For the record_ , I don’t think that Bobo would do that. And not just because he’s my grandfather.” There it was again. _Grandfather_. What the hell? “I don’t think he would do anything to put her in danger.” Fitz heard murmurs of agreement. “Or her. I’m not sure which one, maybe both of them, but he just, he wouldn’t do that.”

Fitz didn’t need to be able to see them to know which two women Deke was referring to. He wouldn’t have minded seeing one woman’s reaction to this news. He sighed. He was going to have to show himself sooner or later.

He stepped into the doorway of the lab just as the Director was saying, “I still think we need to keep an eye on—”

The Director stopped speaking as every eye in the room turned to Fitz. He gave a little wave, which reminded him that he shouldn’t try to lift his arms with broken ribs. “Hi.”

“Uh, Fitz, we were just—”

Fitz cut the Director off. “I heard you. You think I relayed a message to S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“Well, someone did. They knew we were coming.”

“Which gave the Chronicoms time to limp away and regroup,” said Daisy.

“A few of them,” said Dr. Simmons.

“They’re robots. A few is all they need to build more.”

“And you think it was me?” asked Fitz. He thought they were losing focus on the main point here.

“No,” said the Director. Fitz could tell he was being honest, which surprised him. “We don’t think that and none of the evidence suggests it, but we need to know the truth. Someone did warn them, and you used to work for S.H.I.E.L.D. Any idea how they might have known?”

“Maybe they installed an implant in him, like with Akela Amador,” said Agent Coulson. He looked around the room at their blank faces. “What? Sometimes people have robot parts; there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“I’m not part robot,” Fitz said. Something he never thought he’d have to say.

“Yeah, I checked him when we picked him up. No bugs or implants. All human,” said Deke.

“You did?” asked Fitz.

“We’re fighting alien robots who can steal faces. You can’t be too careful.”

“Ok, can we focus back on the fact that somehow the Chronicoms knew we were coming?” said Daisy. “If none of us told them, then who did?”

The Director turned to Jemma. “You contacted your people in the Resistance, told them to meet us. Any way one of them could have ratted us out?”

“No, not a chance,” she said. “They’re willing to give their lives to defeat S.H.I.E.L.D., and many of them have. They all have stories like mine, of families and friends and colleagues ripped from them, lives lost or ruined. None of them would betray us.”

The team stood silent around the room, lost in thought. Fitz stared at Jemma. He couldn’t imagine how he would feel, what he would be willing to sacrifice, if anything had happened to her in that battle. He understood what these Resistance fighters were fighting for.

“Let’s check them out anyway,” said Daisy. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking at Jemma, “but we trust one another, so that means the Resistance is the weak link here. Maybe their comms were intercepted; we don’t know how they operate.”

The Director nodded, “Start looking into it, Agent Johnson.” He looked over at Jemma. “We’ll need a list of all your contacts and as much information as you can give us about how the Resistance operates.”

Jemma sighed. “Fine. But you won’t find anything.”

Dr. Simmons was already taking notes on her tablet. “What are the names of the Resistance agents you know?”

“Looks like we’re keeping a record now,” Deke said, under his breath. Yo-Yo rolled her eyes.

“There’s Victoria Hand, and Antoine Triplett.” Dr. Simmons nodded. They had already met and worked with these operatives.

“And Ward. Grant Ward.”

Dr. Simmons stopped tapping on her tablet. The room was so silent Fitz was pretty sure he could hear the pain he felt when he gasped.

“Well that’s a twist,” said Agent Coulson.

“Grant Ward?” said Daisy. “Every time. Every single damn time.”

“It makes sense,” said Dr. Simmons. “A double agent in every dimension.”

“Who’s Grant Ward?” asked Deke.

“What is happening?” asked Jemma.

“He’s dead,” said May. It wasn’t clear who’s question she was answering. “He’s dead, and if he’s not I’m going to kill him.”

The Director nodded at her. “I have no problem with that plan.”

Fitz was pleased that they had moved on from suspecting him to suspecting someone else, but he was confused. Were they talking about his _friend_ Grant Ward?


	5. Chapter 5

Fitz had made some poor life decisions. He knew that now. Between the work he’d done for S.H.I.E.L.D. and now this revelation about Grant Ward he was pretty sure he should stop trusting his instincts, except that was what his instincts were telling him, so…

He had met Grant Ward at S.H.I.E.L.D. Ward was a high-level specialist, which meant he was cool. Fitz had been surprised that Ward had wanted to talk to him; he’d show up at his lab and chat while Fitz worked on his “doodads,” as Ward called them. At first Fitz had assumed he was there to sneak new tech or to convince him to build him something (how many times had an agent asked him to build them an exploding pen—for what possible use?), but Ward had never asked him for anything. He said Fitz reminded him of his little brother. Now Fitz wondered if Ward even had a little brother.

They hadn’t been close, more the kind of friend you say hi to in the halls than the kind you have a drink with after work. Still, Grant Ward had been one of the only friendly faces Fitz had encountered during his years at S.H.I.E.L.D. Of course he’d be dead wrong about him.

At first he hadn’t believed what the team was saying. Your Ward might be a double-crosser, but that’s another dimension. What had convinced him was Jemma. The look on her face. Her absolute confusion.

“Grant Ward is an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. in this dimension,” he told them.

“No,” she said. “No, I know him. He’s loyal to the Resistance. His family was killed by S.H.I.E.L.D. His little brother. They burned down the family home or something.” She looked around the room at each face, desperate to be believed. “I’ve spoken to him. He’s been with the Resistance for years.”

That’s when Fitz knew. A man who could lie to Jemma like this was not to be trusted.

He explained what he knew of Ward, and their stories lined up enough that they knew he was the same man telling similar lies. Jemma gradually came around, although she seemed shaken that even her new Resistance partners were potential threats.

“I just wanted to do some good,” she said.

“You have,” Fitz told her. He had moved to stand beside her during the discussion over Ward. He sensed she needed support.

“So,” Jemma said, looking up to meet the faces of the team, “Ward did this?”

“Yes,” and “Ward did this,” echoed from every agent but Deke, who said “No idea.”

They all turned to look at him. “Still no clue who this Ward guy is, but I’m all Team Good Guys, so down with the man. Amirite?”

Everyone had ignored him, which from what Fitz had seen was the usual end to Deke’s meeting contributions.

It was unclear what Ward’s intentions were—was he working for S.H.I.E.L.D. within in the Resistance or the Resistance within S.H.I.E.L.D.?—but either way he had lied to both Fitz and Jemma and couldn’t be trusted.

“We know he’s a threat from our dimension, and we know he’s a double and maybe triple agent here. Whether he was the leak or not, we can’t trust him, and anyone who is trusting him is compromised,” said the Director.

Jemma sighed. She looked defeated. She had brought them these contacts, and they had led them into a trap. She didn’t know who to trust. Fitz understood the feeling.

“So, what can we do?” she asked.

“I was hoping you’d ask that,” said the Director. He looked from her to Fitz. “How close are you to finishing that thing you don’t want us to know about?”

Jemma was surprised to learn that they all knew that she and Fitz were working on the bioweapon cure. Fitz had not been surprised, and he told her so when they were next alone.

“They’re bloody spies, Jemma. And you’re not exactly an expert at lying.”

“I convinced you, didn’t I? The first time we met you thought I was going to shoot you.”

“You weren’t?”

“Of course not!” she said. “I’d never do that. Anyway, you smelled too nice to shoot,” she said. She ducked her head away from him, and he thought he could see a slight blush on her half-hidden cheeks.

His brain was a little foggy from her comment—what did it mean that he smelled nice?—but he gave his head a little shake to clear it. “I also recall you were telling everyone you were Sharon Carter, so—”

“Oh would you stop with that. I had limited resources, I told you,” she said. He smiled. They were getting on much better since the battle. Amazing what jumping in front of a bullet for someone will do for your relationship.

They were in the lab, at their stations. Fitz still wasn’t feeling great, but he had been given some painkillers and another couple rounds in Dr. Simmons’s healing pod. As long as he didn’t make sudden movements or lift his arms or sneeze, he was good.

He was assisting Jemma with the fix for the bioweapon. It had been his idea to attack the device itself, rather than simply cure the illness it caused. He knew the mechanics of the device, having designed them himself, and so he was setting up a sort of kill switch that would be triggered if the bioweapon had yet to activate. A pulse would be sent out that knocked out the trigger mechanism on the weapon, rendering it incapable of spreading the plague it carried.

They knew that triggering such a device before every attack wasn’t possible, so Jemma was also working on a cure, to be spread rapidly by the same trigger device Fitz had installed in the bioweapon. A prevention method and, should that not work, a cure—a one two punch of scientific creativity. Fitz wasn’t sure how well it would work (even with such a solution could they have moved quickly enough to save Jemma’s team?), but he was sure that they had to try. They were both far too invested in this particular problem not to try to solve it.

He felt, working with Jemma on this project, that he had found his calling. It reminded him of working as a child on small projects for his mother—fixing her oven or the radiator when it broke. She was always so grateful and proud, and he had felt like he was using his gifts to help someone he cared about, which was the greatest feeling in the world. He stole a glance at Jemma, her hair pulled back from her face, the safety goggles on her face slightly askew. Yes, that is exactly what this feeling was.

Fitz hadn’t asked too many questions about what the team was going to use their project for. He was concerned about upsetting Jemma, who was excited about the prospect of finally completing her bioweapon solve. He didn’t want her to know about his doubts, but there was something the team wasn’t telling them. He could feel it.

His suspicions were confirmed after he and Jemma announced that they had finished the initial design and would begin manufacturing a prototype. Deke had grabbed the tablet containing their work and said, “I’ll do it; it’s kinda my thing.” They had told him that no they didn’t need it in rose gold, and he had rushed off to the 3D printer.

The Director and Daisy pulled Fitz aside. “Excellent work,” said the Director.

“Thank you,” said Fitz. He wasn’t sure why, but the way they were looking at him was giving him the beginnings of a fight or flight response.

“So,” said Daisy. “How would you feel about catching up with an old friend?”

xxx

Fitz tugged at his earlobe again. “Stop messing with your earpiece.” Daisy’s voice sounded in his ear.

“It tickles,” he said. He was going to have to design a non-tickly earpiece. If he survived the day.

“Focus, Agent Fitz. He’ll be there any minute,” said the Director.

“He’s terrible at this. Why didn’t we remember he’s terrible at this?”

“I can hear you,” he said. He said it a little too loudly—the woman at the café table next to him glanced in his direction. Talking to yourself in public never looked cool. Hopefully he sounded crazy but not threatening. He didn’t need anyone calling the police.

Fitz was sitting at an outdoor table at a small café, waiting for Grant Ward to arrive. It was the first time that he had been out in public since the team had first snatched him from his lab, and if he hadn’t been so terrified that he was about to die or be put in prison, he would have been thrilled to have a break from the plane. The skies were clear and blue. He’d missed the sun on his face.

The team believed that Ward would know from both S.H.I.E.L.D. and Resistance intel that Fitz had gone missing. He would also know about the bioweapon, and, they hoped, would be interested in its cure no matter who he was working for.

“If he’s a S.H.I.E.L.D. loyalist then he’d want to destroy it,” said the Director in their pre-mission conversation.

“And destroy me for creating it?” asked Fitz.

The Director hadn’t responded to that, but he gave Fitz a grim smile. “We’ll do everything in our power to keep you safe. I wouldn’t put you in danger if I didn’t think you could handle yourself, Agent Fitz.”

The team seemed to have confidence in him and in his espionage skills that he didn’t share; was it possible that the other dimension him was some kind of badass spy? He doubted it. But he did like being included in their missions, and he did like that the Director had begun to refer to him as Agent Fitz. He felt like he was becoming a part of their team, however much he knew that he was just playing the role of another man. Not for the first time he felt a little jealous of his doppelganger. What he wouldn’t give to be a part of a family like this. Or to have a beautiful woman like Dr. Simmons miss him.

“He’s coming,” Daisy said. “All agents in position; Ward is on route to the cafe.”

Fitz stiffened, holding his breath, but then he shook himself and tried to relax. They’d told him to lean into the anxiety (it was normal to be nervous in a situation like this, Ward would expect that), but he thought that passing out before Ward even arrived might not be the best strategy.

“Hey, buddy.” Fitz heard Ward’s voice behind him. Ward walked beside the table, smiling. “It’s good to see you.”

Ward had never called Fitz “buddy” in all the years he knew him, so he suspected that he was making a point of not saying his name. Ward did know he was on the run, then. Being out in the open like this where there might be cameras or S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives was a risk, but they needed to be around civilians for the initial meeting, in case Ward showed his nastier side.

“Good to see you, too,” said Fitz. He took a breath and winced. His ribs were still hurting him.

“You ok?” asked Ward. He sat in the seat opposite Fitz. “You look a little pale.”

“I’ve been better.”

“I wondered. I heard about…” he paused. He was clearly not wanting to say aloud in public what he had heard. “Your situation. Glad to see you’re all in one piece.” Ward sounded genuinely worried about him. Damn the man was an excellent actor.

Ward waved at a passing waiter and gestured toward Fitz’s coffee cup. I’ll have what he’s having. He was so smooth, thought Fitz. How could he have ever thought that this man wanted to be his friend?

“So,” said Ward, “where’ve you been? You just disappeared. I’ve been worried.”

“Something happened,” said Fitz. “I met people, and they changed my mind about…things.”

Ward frowned. “Who? What kind of people? You can’t trust everyone you meet, Fi—friend.”

“I’m learning that.” From you, Fitz thought. “I’ve learned that a lot of what I thought I knew were lies. And what I thought was right was wrong.”

He placed a chunk of the bioweapon on the table, the chunk from Jemma’s necklace. The scrap of metal with S.H.I.E.L.D. stamped into it. “I’ve learned that the people I was trusting before were wrong.”

Ward picked up the twisted metal shard. “I’ve seen this before,” he said. He made eye contact with Fitz and then slid the metal piece back toward him across the table. “I think I might know the people you’re talking about.”

This had all been part of the plan. Fitz was to reveal to Ward that he was aligning with the Resistance. They didn’t know Ward’s loyalties, but they knew that Fitz would have no reason to build an anti-bioweapon device if he was still with S.H.I.E.L.D. Best to convince Ward he’d switched teams and just deal with the fallout. Fitz wasn’t getting back in the good graces of S.H.I.E.L.D. at this point anyway. He doubted that he hadn’t been noticed by any of the cameras, voice detection devices, or biometric sensors at the S.H.I.E.L.D. bases they had infiltrated (especially the one where he had been shot).

“I thought you would,” said Fitz. “The owner sends her regards,” Fitz said as he slipped the piece of Jemma’s necklace back into his pocket.

Ward smiled. “I thought you two would get along. Big brains and all.” He was doing that thing where he looked sort of proud of Fitz, like he did when Fitz thought they were friends. Like he was his big brother. “How’d you meet her?”

“I had a run-in with some people at the lab.”

Ward leaned forward. “The day your lab was attacked. I looked for you. I thought they’d gotten you. How did you make it out?”

“I had some help.”

“I didn’t know our softball team had anyone there that day.”

Apparently the Resistance members referred to themselves in public as the “softball team.” Fitz had been annoyed when he found out he would have to feign knowledge of the sport. They were in bloody England, for god’s sake. But most of the Resistance members were Americans, and Jemma claimed they couldn’t understand the rules of “soccer” enough to make it a convincing ruse. Bloody Americans.

“Yes, it was the thrower, the one who throws the balls,” said Fitz.

Ward raised his eyebrows, clearly amused. “The pitcher?”

“Yes,” said Fitz. “That one. She helped me escape.”

Ward looked impressed. Victoria Hand—the head of tactical operations for the Resistance—had helped him escape the Chronicoms, that’s what Fitz was claiming. It was bold of them; they didn’t know how much Ward knew about Resistance operations. He could know immediately that Fitz was lying.

“Why wasn’t I brought in on that? I could have gotten to you easily, had they asked,” Ward said.

“I don’t know. I was told they were coming for me anyway when the attack occurred. They wanted me to help out the team. Because I know things. They thought I was the only one to help.”

“Yeah,” said Ward. “I told them about you.”

This caught Fitz completely off guard. Ward had mentioned him to the Resistance? Or maybe he just wanted him to think he had? All this double-crossing spy stuff was making his head spin. Ward looked sincere, but then he always had.

“You told them about me? No one said that.”

“I told them you’d make an excellent first baseman,” said Ward. He could tell how much the softball talk was irritating Fitz, that much was obvious from the grin on his face. “Thought the team could use your skills.”

“Yes, well it has worked out. I am good at protecting the first of the white diamonds that players run toward after hitting the ball with a stick.” Fitz had been given a basic outline of the rules of softball by Coulson, and he and Deke thought they’d done a good job memorizing them. They’d even played a little catch in the lab, before Dr. Simmons had shooed them away for knocking her microscope to the floor.

“Sounds like you know your stuff,” said Ward. He seemed to be trying not to laugh. This was the problem with Ward. He was always so nice, it made it hard to hate him.

Back to the task at hand. “I do know my stuff. Which is why they brought me on for the important match I contacted you about.”

Ward’s smile evaporated. At least he understood the gravity of what they were discussing. “Fitz, I’m not sure why you’re contacting me about this. If the team asked for your help on a project, you should be going to them.”

This had been the delicate point that the Director had made sure to hash out with Fitz. They had to figure out a way to convince Ward that Fitz coming to him with the device made sense. And Fitz could think of only one way to do that.

“I trust you,” he said.

Ward took a deep breath and squinted at Fitz, like he was trying to see through him.

“I’ve known you a long time, and I know about your brother. I know you’ve never lied to me.” Fitz saw Ward wince, and it felt good to know that he knew something the spy did not. “I only trusted the softball team because they told me you were with them. But I want you to be the one who decides what happens next. I’m in way over my head here, but I know you’d never led me astray.”

Fitz took a small metal key out of his pocket and slid it across the table. “I’ll leave the decision up to you.”

Ward stared at the key and then reached for it. He gazed at it for a moment, so small in his hand. Then he slid it back across the table. “I’m not the one you should be trusting, Fitz. There’s a lot you don’t know about me.”

Fitz picked up the key, unsure of what to say. The plan had not anticipated Ward doing or saying this.

Ward glanced around them like he didn’t know who was listening. “We can’t talk here, but I’d like to tell you more. Come with me. I’d like to earn your trust.”

“Stick to the plan, Agent Fitz,” said the Director’s voice. “That’s an order.”

Fitz tugged at his ear. He knew what his gut was telling him, but then he’d been ordering himself not to listen to it for weeks now. “Where did you have in mind?”

xxx

It was dark, so dark that Fitz couldn’t see what kind of room he was in. And then, just as he could feel his heart rate begin to quicken, the room was flooded with light, revealing a small and sparsely furnished living room with no windows, which made sense since they had walked down an outdoor flight of stairs and into a basement. He blinked from the sudden change in lighting.

“Sorry about that,” said Ward, who was moving from the light switch to a beige sofa. He began tidying up, picking up a bowl from the coffee table and taking it to another room, which Fitz assumed was the kitchen. “Not used to having company.” He came back into the room and gestured at the chairs. “Make yourself at home. Such as it is.”

“This is where you live?” Fitz had seen S.H.I.E.L.D. prison facilities with more personality. Though he guessed if you were always living a lie like Ward maybe you ceased to have a personality of your own. He sat down in a chair facing the door.

“It’s a safe house, one of many. I move every few days.”

The look on Fitz’s face must have communicated his shock, because Ward nodded and said, “You haven’t heard. I’ve been on the move from S.H.I.E.L.D. for a couple weeks now. Since the robots attacked.”

“Why?”

“Because I disobeyed a direct order.” Ward sat down on the sofa across from Fitz. “I refused to round up S.H.I.E.L.D. agents and give them to the robots.” He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and rubbing his face. “They were removing their faces, stealing them.” He shuddered. “I’ve seen some things; I’ve done some things. But that was…too much.”

“So S.H.I.E.L.D. is working with the Chronicoms.”

“Chronicoms? Is that what they’re called?” Ward had his eyes laser-focused on Fitz’s face. “How do you know that?”

“I’m working with the people trying to stop them. I helped them attack their base a few days ago.”

“You did?” Ward looked shocked and maybe even a little impressed? “ _You_ did?”

“Yeah, even got a little shot,” Fitz said, gesturing toward his chest. “You know how it is.” Ward could be impressed all he wanted. Lying, smarmy, superspy man. “So, back to the conversation we were having earlier. You had things to tell me?”

Ward sighed and looked around the room, perhaps searching for his bloody spine, Fitz thought.

“You said you trusted me, but there are things about me that you wouldn’t like, if you knew,” he said.

Fitz thought that this was the most honest thing Ward had ever said to him, but he said, “I doubt that.”

Ward looked sad and resigned to whatever was about to happen. “I never told you about my 084 mission.”

“You retrieved an 084?” Fitz had never seen an actual 084, but he had heard stories about a few of them, the ones that weren’t classified (and a few that were classified—even secret agents liked to brag). “That must have been a high-profile mission.”

“The most top-secret of all the top-secret missions I’ve done. I was sent in to find the 084 and destroy it.”

“Destroy it?” The normal policy for 084s was to bring them in for research. An object of unknown origin had a lot to teach, especially to science. Fitz had always hoped one might be sent to his lab.

“I thought it was unusual too, but I didn’t question it. I never questioned my orders.” Fitz heard the past tense; Ward was explaining to him how things had changed. “So you located it?” Ward nodded. “And then what?”

“It wasn’t an object. It was a girl.” Fitz heard a muffled gasp in his earpiece. Apparently, his softball team was just as surprised by this story as he was. “Get him out of there,” he heard the Director say.

“A young woman,” said Ward. “She had no idea what was happening, or why I was pointing a gun at her.” Ward paused, tormented by memories.

“And what did you do?” Fitz said, to get him going again.

“I killed her,” said Ward. Fitz felt bile rise in his throat. Why had he sat _here_ , with Ward between him and the door?

“Well,” said Ward, looking up from his lap and smiling, “I pretended to.”

“You what?” Fitz drew in a ragged breath. “What are you telling me?”

“I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t kill her. I don’t know why. I’ve killed before.” His eyes bored into Fitz’s. “I’m not a good man, Fitz. I’ve done horrible things for them, for S.H.I.E.L.D. And my family—I told you someone else killed them. That was a lie. It was me. I did that. I hated them so much I burned down our house, and my little brother—I didn’t know he was there.”

Fitz gasped.

“Yes,” said Ward. “I’m not a good man.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?”

“Because I want you to understand what I’ve done, and I want you to understand why I changed. Because I want you to know who I am before you say you trust me.”

“I’m not sure I’ll ever trust you,” said Fitz. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting to hear, but this was beyond anything he could handle. He couldn’t even pretend not to be repulsed.

“She said the same thing,” said Ward, a faint smile on his lips.

“Who?”

“Skye,” said Ward. “That was her name, the 084.”

“Was?” Fitz prepared himself to hear more horrific tales from the life of Grant Ward. Ward didn’t disappoint.

“I saved her. Faked her death. Told my S.O. she was dead, then took her to a safe house.” He looked around him. “She even spent some time in this one.”

“You talk about her like she’s gone.”

“She is,” Grief was not an expression Fitz had ever expected to see on Ward’s face. “I thought I could hide her, keep her safe until we figured out why they were after her.”

Ward did not need to say the rest for Fitz to understand. “But you couldn’t.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D. got to her. She tried to contact some of her old hacker friends to get help, and S.H.I.E.L.D. tracked her down. She bled out before I got to her, and when I saw her, lying there…” Ward had tears in his eyes. Fitz was not sure what it felt like to be in love, and he didn’t know the exact nature of Ward’s relationship with this Skye. He did know what it was like to be willing to do anything for someone else, even a woman you’d just met.

“Is that why you joined the Resistance?”

Ward wiped his eyes. “Malick called me into his office, said that if I ever disobeyed his orders again he was going to tell what I did to my family. Put me in jail. He’s been threatening that since I was a kid, since he recruited me for S.H.I.E.L.D. He said that he understood the girl was attractive, and that in his day he would have gone for her too, but that I couldn’t let a woman get in the way of my work.”

Ward spat out the last few words, like they tasted bitter in his mouth. “And that’s when I snapped. I went straight from his office to an agent I knew from the Resistance—I’d been ordered to watch him—and offered my services. I’ve been working for them within S.H.I.E.L.D. ever since.”

“That’s…quite a story.” Fitz wasn’t sure if he was supposed to believe Ward, or if a real spy would have known that he was being played or distracted or something else nefarious. Fitz only knew what his instincts were telling him, and they were telling him the same thing they had back at the café and every day since he had met Ward. They were telling him he could trust this man.

“I wanted you to know. And I wanted whoever is listening in to know as well.”

Fitz’s mouth went dry. “Listening in?”

“Whoever you’re on comms with.”

“I’m not,” Fitz’s palms were starting to sweat, and he rubbed them on his pants. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Fitz you’ve been tugging at your ear and talking to yourself since I first saw you at the café. No offense, but you’re terrible at this.”

Fitz shook his head in defiance. “Well I’ve had a steep learning curve these past couple weeks.”

Ward didn’t smile. He seemed to have shaken off his emotions and was now watching Fitz almost clinically, as though inspecting him. “I don’t know who you’re working for, but it’s not the Resistance. I would have known.”

Fitz swallowed. This had always been a possibility, that Ward wouldn’t believe him, that Ward wouldn’t trust him. What was he meant to say? They’d discussed it, but he couldn’t remember. His mind was a panicked blank.

“Whoever it is, I want to make it clear that I’m done playing games. That I have nothing left to lose.” He pulled a gun that Fitz hadn’t been aware of from under a sofa cushion. “And that I have a message for them.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My apologies for what happens to Skye in this dimension. I wanted to give Ward a reason to try to be better (and I didn't want any more double characters to deal with). 
> 
> Oh, and I mentioned that Gideon Malick thought she was hot because young him hit on her in the show (so gross). 
> 
> Also, my science in this is total fiction. I know you can't "cure" a bioweapon like this. Hoping you'll give me a little leeway.


	6. Chapter 6

Ward spun around and aimed the gun at the front door just as it blew off its hinges. May stood in the wreckage, with Yo-Yo and Agent Coulson behind her. “Gun,” she yelled, as Agent Coulson stepped in front of the two women.

“You’ll want to put that down, son,” he said.

Ward’s eyes were wide. “Agent Coulson? You died.”

“Sounds like me,” said Agent Coulson. “Put the gun away, so we can continue the nice chat you were having.”

“You were one of the greatest S.H.I.E.L.D. agents; Malick said you sacrificed yourself to save him.”

“Knowing what you do about him, do you really think that’s what happened?”

“Are you working for S.H.I.E.L.D. now?” Ward looked back at Fitz. “Is this S.H.I.E.L.D.?” He looked panicked, which wasn’t what Fitz had expected. Apparently seeing ghosts wasn’t normal for even super spies.

“Calm down; we’ll explain.” Agent Coulson took a step forward. A red light flashed by the door and a high-pitched beeping sound reverberated around the room.

Ward had been lowering his weapon, but now he pointed it right at Agent Coulson’s chest. “You’re one of them. That’s a sensor for robots. You’re one of the aliens. Fitz, what have you—”

A gunshot sounded, and Ward collapsed on the sofa, a wave of blue lines coursing over his face. All eyes turned to Melinda May, who was now holding Yo-Yo’s I.C.E.R.

“What did I say?” said Agent Coulson. “I said ‘let’s try to talk to him.’”

“You forgot I don’t like the sound of his voice.”

Agent Coulson nodded, tilting his head to the side to look at Ward’s unconscious face. “Unsettling isn’t it?”

Fitz tried to speak, but his voice was strained and squeaky. “What. The. Hell?”

Yo-Yo was securing Ward’s weapon and restraining his arms. She looked up at Fitz and smiled. “We came to get you.”

Agent Coulson turned to May. “What do you think we should do with him?”

“He’s not coming on our ship, and he’s not going anywhere near Daisy.”

“Agreed,” the Director said on comms.

“We have to get out of here. We’ve made a lot of noise,” said Yo-Yo. The alarm was still sounding, and Fitz’s could hear a police siren getting louder in the distance.

There was a muffled conversation over comms that Fitz couldn’t quite make out, and then the Director ordered them to bring Ward outside. “I think we have a place we can take him.”

Back on the ship, Fitz went to Dr. Simmons in the communications bay. She was staring at a computer screen, tight lines around her eyes and mouth. Fitz had caught her with this same pained expression and conducting this same program on her computer before. “Dr. Simmons?”

She jumped, as though she hadn’t noticed him walking up (surprising because he wasn’t that sneaky) and masked her agitation with a bright smile. “Fitz, glad to see you’re all right.”

“Can I help with—” he was trying to see what she was working on, but she had already cleared her screen.

“No, no I’ve got it under control.” She had said this each time he asked, and each time he could tell she was lying. He had asked Daisy about it, and Daisy had been silent for a long time before saying, “She misses you, the other you. I don’t think there’s anything you can do.”

He decided to give in to what Dr. Simmons wanted and change topics. “Have you seen Jemma? She’s not in the lab.”

Dr. Simmons’s smile turned sympathetic. “She went with the others, to take Ward to the Resistance.”

“What?” Fitz himself had been retrieved by Deke and brought to the plane, while May, Yo-yo, and Agent Coulson had thrown Ward in the back of a black vehicle and sped away. “But why?”

“She thought that Ward would only help us if we used the people he knows in the Resistance to convince him we’re not evil robots.”

“We want his help?”

Dr. Simmons’s nose turned up, like she smelled something foul. “Not all of us.”

Fitz didn’t know if he believed Ward’s redemption story, but he had to admit the man would make a powerful ally. If he could be trusted.

“He can’t be trusted, no matter what stories he tells,” she said. He really was starting to wonder if this woman possessed some kind of telepathy that only worked on him. He blushed. He hoped she couldn’t read all of his thoughts.

“Jemma’s with him,” he said.

Dr. Simmons put a reassuring hand on his arm, then blushed herself and pulled it back. What was the protocol for hanging out with your soulmate from another dimension, he wondered? Surely the other him wouldn’t get jealous of himself. That would be ridiculous, right?

Daisy came in and saved Fitz from his confusion. “Message from the team,” she said. “Ward is awake and talking to Hand. They think they’re getting somewhere.”

“And if they do?” asked Dr. Simmons.

“Then we try to take out S.H.I.E.L.D. with Grant Ward, I guess.” Daisy shrugged. “He’s pretty good at it, from what I remember.”

Dr. Simmons sighed. “Is this what we do now?”

“I go where the Director points me,” said Daisy. She glanced at a nearby computer monitor which was showing a file on Ward, complete with a photo of him smiling. “Though I’m glad to be on comms for this one.”

She looked at Dr. Simmons and her expression softened. “Any luck with the—” she was gesturing to the computer, but Dr. Simmons cut her off.

“No.” She turned her back to them and began typing. “I need more time.”

“We’ll give you some space,” Daisy said. She gestured for Fitz to leave the room with her. As they were entering the lab he glanced back at Dr. Simmons. She was working on the program from before, but he still couldn’t quite make out what it was.

“Hey, Daisy?” he asked. He didn’t think he’d get a different response if he asked her again about Jemma’s secretive behavior, so he asked her the other question that was plaguing him. “The other me—other Fitz—what’s he like?”

Daisy stopped walking and turned to face him. “He’s different. From you.” She spoke with care, like she wasn’t sure how much to say. Why did it always feel like they were keeping things from him? Didn’t he have a right to know about himself? “What do you want to know?” she asked.

“Is he like Ward?”

Daisy looked surprised. “Why would you say that? Who told you—”

“I mean a spy like Ward. Good at undercover and guns and brave and stuff.”

Daisy nodded, relieved. “Oh, yeah, that. Yes, you’re a regular James Bond in our dimension. The cute Scottish kind.” She was trying to make a joke, but she wasn’t smiling. Fitz suspected he’d hit on something important.

“Is he like Ward in other ways?”

Daisy avoided his eyes, staring at her feet. “I don’t really think I should be telling you—”

“Why not? Everyone’s hiding things—Dr. Simmons is hiding something and the rest of you clam up whenever he’s mentioned. What’s so bad that you won’t tell me? Is the other me such a monster? And if he is—if I am, why does she miss me? Why would you all seem to care about me so much? What am I?”

Fitz had unloaded a little more than he had wanted to, and his breathing was coming in ragged bursts. He knew he was raising his voice, and anyone might hear, but he didn’t care. He was so tired of spies and their secrets. Beyond tired. His (former?) friend pulling a gun on him only an hour before kind of tired.

Daisy raised a hand and rubbed her temples. He was not the only one who was tired. “Calm down, ok? We’re not keeping things from you, well, maybe we are, but it’s for the best. We don’t want to influence this timeline, this dimension or whatever, more than we have to. And telling you about another life you led is a…morally grey area.” She said these last words like she had been told them by someone else. The team had had a conversation about this, then. “We don’t want to mess with your choices or your free will, or something.”

Fitz snorted. “I can make my own choices, thanks. But I like to know all the facts first.”

Daisy chuckled. “You really are a lot like him. I can never win an argument with either of you.”

“Just tell me—”

“He’s been through things, ok?” she said. “He’s you but if you’d been through a lot of trauma and hardship. He’s a good man, deep down. But he’s made mistakes. He’s done things that have hurt people.” She ducked her head again, like she didn’t want him to see the emotions on her face. He wondered if Fitz had hurt her, but he decided that he didn’t want to know.

“Like Ward?” he asked.

She nodded. “Like Ward.”

Fitz was silent for a long moment. He would need some time to process, but he wasn’t sure he would get that time while working with these people. They always seemed to hurtle from traumatic event to traumatic event at breakneck pace. Maybe that’s why his other self had done bad things; he never got a chance to heal.

“It sounds like the other me could use a therapist.”

Daisy smiled. “We all could.”

He decided to bring up another burning question, since she was finally talking. “And Jemma—I mean Dr. Simmons. We’re—they’re…together?” He knew the answer, that much they had told him, but he was hoping she would tell him more.

“Together. In love,” she said.

Fitz could feel the heat rising in his cheeks, but he decided to be bold and say, “I just wonder how that…how that happened?”

Daisy’s face broke into a big grin, one of the first he had seen on any of the team’s faces. At least his humiliation could bring her some joy. “Is someone thinking about asking someone out?”

Fitz shook his head—could his face get any redder?—and tried to get the conversation back on track. “Is that what I did? Asked her out?”

“No, you saved her life a bunch of times and kind of stumbled around your feelings until they were so obvious that neither of you could deny them. It was painful to watch.” It may have been painful, but she seemed thrilled to discuss it. “Don’t do that. You’re on track for it; you’ve already saved her life once.”

He could feel the pain in his chest, a twinge from his injury that reminded him of Jemma.

“So,” despite his embarrassment he decided to lay all his cards on the table, “what do I do?”

Daisy made no effort to hide the fact that she was loving this. “Ok, first off you have to just tell her you like her and ask her out. It’s ok if it’s awkward; she’s into that.” This was good information, because there was no scenario in which he asked a woman out and it wasn’t awkward. “Just be yourself. I know that sounds cliché, but that’s what she likes. You.”

“It sounds like she likes him, the other me. The super spy one.”

“Ok, first off, he is not a super spy. He’s you with more confidence and experience, which yes, makes you a formidable field agent. And second, that’s not the part of you she likes. She likes you because you’re sweet and you try to be a good man.” Daisy scrunched up her nose. “Also, I think she thinks your brain is sexy and she mentioned something about your hands once, but I try not to hear those details.”

Fitz also didn’t want to hear those details, especially not from Daisy. “I think that’s all I needed—”

“What else—don’t mention curses, she hates that. If someone ever asks you to help them build a sexy robot lady, just say no.” Fitz thought this would have gone without saying, but he guessed not. “And—I can’t stress this one enough—” she locked eyes with him, “if you are ever on the planet of Kitson, do not visit the brothels.”

Fitz’s eyes grew wide.

“Not that you did, the other you,” she said. “But I think it bears mentioning. I’d avoid that planet altogether, if you can.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “I don’t need to know any more, thanks.”

“We haven’t even got to breakfast nooks yet. She’s pro.”

“Great,” he said. “If we survive this mess long enough to eat breakfast and I manage to be the right kind of nice and awkward and not-mentioning-of-curses guy that she likes, I’ll look for one.”

Daisy eyed him in a way that made him nervous. “Actually, I can think of something she likes that we could maybe do for you two. I’ll talk to Mack. And maybe Deke.”

Fitz was starting to be sorry he’d brought any of this up. “Don’t tell her I asked. Please.”

Daisy’s smile was warm and affectionate. Whatever pain the other him had caused her, she did care for him. “I’m only helping. Trust me.”

Trust was a complicated thing in a world of spies; she was asking a lot. “Just let me talk to her, before you do whatever it is.”

“Copy that,” she said. “Lover boy.”

xxx

Ward was sitting on a crate of weapons in the hangar of the plane. He held one of the devices that was meant to counteract the S.H.I.E.L.D. bioweapon. It was a small metal sphere that fit in his palm. “So this is what all the fuss is about.”

Fitz shrugged. He walked to a nearby crate and sat down, adjusting the straps on his bulletproof vest. “Fuss?”

“There’s been chatter on the S.H.I.E.L.D. frequencies. They recognized your friend Jemma from the security cameras at the armory. They know she stole the bioweapon there. They’re worried she’ll come up with a solve.”

“So they’ll be expecting it?”

“Maybe. Maybe it means they won’t try using the bioweapon, in case we can stop it.” He put the ball inside a pocket in his vest. “Or maybe it means they’ve come up with a solve of their own.”

Fitz was struggling to hook his I.C.E.R. to his utility belt.

“Lift the thing,” said Ward.

Fitz did as he said and the I.C.E.R. clicked into place. “Thanks.”

Ward pulled something out of another pocket and began fiddling with it. It looked like his S.H.I.E.L.D. badge. “This is a big risk, you know,” he said.

“What is?”

“All of this.” Ward spread his arms to reference the entire spaceship and its occupants, possibly the entire world. “The mission.”

“The mission is a risk, but it’s the biggest risk to you.” Fitz eyed him. “And I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

Ward chuckled with sad eyes. “Me either.”

They passed another few moments in silence. Fitz checked the straps on his bulletproof vest again. You could never be too careful.

“You believe all this about another dimension?” Ward asked.

Fitz got the impression that Ward wasn’t just trying to commiserate about the lunatics in the next room; he wanted Fitz’s opinion.

“I do.”

“What convinced you?”

Fitz watched Jemma walk across the hallway at the back of the hangar with Dr. Simmons. They were having what looked like a heated conversation.

“Yeah, that one threw me too,” said Ward, who had apparently tracked Fitz’s eyeline. “And neither of them is a robot. Or a clone. Or something else sciency.”

“No. Same person, different dimension.”

“There’s another version of you, they said. That’s why they rescued you from the lab. Sentiment.” Ward said this last word in a clinical way, like it was a diagnosis. Patient suffers from sentiment; surgery required. The assessment of a specialist trained to remove all such feelings from his work.

“People just love me, what can I say,” said Fitz. “There’s another you, too.”

Ward grimaced. “Yeah, I got the impression they didn’t like him much.”

“Sounds like he did some bad stuff.”

“We’re the same then.”

“Sounds like the other me did some bad stuff too.”

“Yeah?” Ward was interested.

“We’re a lot alike where they come from, I guess.”

Ward looked skeptical. “Then why do they love you and hate me? They fought for an hour over even bringing me on this plane. Even now I’m not allowed to leave the hangar.”

Fitz didn’t know details, but he decided to tell Ward what he had been thinking. “I think it’s about choices. We all have pain. You can’t choose what happens to you, but you can choose how you deal with it. When bad stuff happens, you can let the pain destroy you, destroy your relationships and the people around you. You can let your pain turn you into someone else’s pain. Or you can choose to learn from the bad and use that knowledge to make yourself more empathetic. _Help_ others with their pain. You can choose to be the bioweapon, or you can choose to be the cure.” He gestured at the outline of the device in Ward’s pocket.

“And the other you made the right choices?”

Fitz shook his head. “No, it sounds like I made a lot of mistakes, hurt people. But life is always offering opportunities to make different choices. And I think I must have made some good ones too.” Fitz thought of Daisy and the look she had given him when they talked about how he hurt people. He was certain it had been a look of forgiveness. “Like you, with the woman you helped. Skye.”

Ward inhaled sharply at the mention of her name. “I don’t know that I did it for her. I think I finally wanted something for myself. Maybe I was just being selfish.” He threw his badge onto the floor with a loud _thwap_. They both stared at it. “Maybe that’s why I failed. Another bad choice.”

“I don’t think love is selfish. Not real love, anyway,” said Fitz.

Ward looked at him like he was from another dimension. “Where did you learn all this stuff?”

Fitz smiled. “My mum. She’s pretty great. And she’s been through a lot.” Fitz thought about his father. He didn’t like to think about his father. “But she’s always made the best of things. And she’s always been there for me.”

“I’ve never had anyone like that,” said Ward.

“Well, now you have me.” Fitz wasn’t sure what kind of promise he was making, but it felt right. He was going to trust himself, and his self was telling him to let Ward in, maybe even to trust him. Maybe he was making a mistake; maybe they were the same mistakes he had made in the other dimension. His trusting nature had got him into trouble before (his years with the evil S.H.I.E.L.D. were a testament to that). But he couldn’t control the actions of others—he couldn’t control whether or not Ward betrayed him. He could only control himself, and he wanted to be the kind of person who gave people a second chance. The kind of person who trusted. What Ward did with that trust was on him.

Ward looked like he was about to speak, but he was cut off by the Director, who had arrived in the hangar with most of the team. All except Dr. Simmons and Daisy. “We all set?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Fitz and Ward replied. Once a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, always a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent.

“Good,” said the Director. He picked up Ward’s badge from the floor and handed it to him. “Let’s end this.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, fyi I wrote most of this fic before we learned in season 7 that Fitz is controlling when and where they jump. So none of this would have actually happened. But whatever.


	7. Chapter 7

The plan was for Ward to use his high-level credentials to get in the door of the S.H.I.E.L.D. base where the last of the Chronicoms were hiding. It was well-known that S.H.I.E.L.D. was hunting Ward, so him presenting himself at a base was more about diversion than stealth.

“They’ll throw everything they have at me,” he had said.

“Then you throw everything you have back,” said Agent Coulson. “You’re a formidable force when you want to be.” Fitz suspected that Agent Coulson held some grudge against Ward, from the way he treated him. He had never met the famed Agent Coulson from his dimension, the one who had died saving Malick’s life (a story he now questioned). This Agent Coulson was funny and sharp but with a spine of steel. Fitz didn’t think he’d want to get on his bad side.

While Ward made a mess at the base entrance (and tried to keep himself alive—“It’s not a suicide mission if you don’t die” had been Agent Coulson’s response when Ward suggested there was no way out), the rest of the team would sneak in and destroy what was left of the Chronicoms and their technology.

“Remember,” the Director told them on the Quinjet as they headed toward the base, “they can’t time jump since their ship jumped back to our dimension. They don’t have a spaceship or anyone off planet to contact. They’re stuck here, that’s the gamble they made to lead us away. We end them here and now, we end this entire mess.”

Fitz knew all of this information, and he knew the rest of them did as well (well, maybe Ward didn’t—he looked pretty confused). Still, it felt good to hear the Director remind them of their goal and why they believed it would succeed. He was a good director. Fitz wished he had a leader he could believe in in his own world.

Fitz was seated next to Jemma. They were paired together for the mission, tasked with recognizing and disabling any alien tech they could find. She seemed anxious, tapping her foot as the Director went over last-minute details. Fitz nudged her with his elbow. “Ready?”

She gave a stiff nod. “As I’ll ever be, I suppose.” She looked at him, and he wasn’t used to seeing concern for him in her eyes, but there it was. “Are you? Last time you got shot.”

“That’s why I brought my trusty vest along again. Thinking of never taking it off again, actually.”

Jemma reached over and placed her hand on top of his. “Don’t do that again, ok? Jump in front of a bullet for me.”

“I can’t make that promise.” The moment felt too real, too vulnerable, with her staring into his eyes and holding his hand, so he said, “I’m just so selfless I can’t help it.”

She didn’t acknowledge his weak attempt at humor, instead she leaned closer to him. “Fitz, there’s something I want to tell you, before—”

Of course that’s when the Director would yell out that they were landing and to get ready. Because that’s how Fitz’s life worked. The woman of his dreams was holding his hand and saying something emotional right before he went into battle, and now he’d probably die before she got to tell him. Typical.

Once they landed, Ward left them to go do his thing, and Fitz and Jemma stalked through the trees behind the base with the rest of the team. It was night, cool and crisp. He had never been to Siberia before, but at least it wasn’t winter, and this summer was unusually warm. Thanks climate change.

Just as Deke was asking, “What’s the signal?” there was an explosion from the other side of the base. Fire and smoke rolled above the flat roof and they heard screams. “Never mind,” he said.

They split into teams. Fitz and Jemma were with May and Yo-yo, and Deke and the Director were with Agent Coulson. Daisy was orchestrating things from the ship, opening doors, hacking things that needed hacking, but Dr. Simmons was relaying all messages. They were keeping Daisy from Ward for some reason, but that was just one more thing that Fitz wasn’t going to ask about.

Once inside the base, Fitz and Jemma set about their work. May and Yo-Yo did some fighting (he was glad he had been assigned to their team—the Director might be enormous and Agent Coulson seemed to have been enhanced with some kind of super strength, but May and Yo-Yo were ferocious in a way he feared and respected). They were trying to be as silent as possible. There were loud noises coming from the front of the base—gunshots and yells—which meant that Ward was still causing trouble. Fitz hoped he could hold out long enough for rescue.

The virus that Fitz, Jemma, and Daisy had engineered and delivered on their last mission had clearly done its job. The Chronicoms were glitchy and the tech they were trying to build in these rooms was half-finished and sloppy, at least for an alien race of super robots. Fitz felt a little sad to be destroying the last of an alien race, especially one based on technology. He’d spent his life trying to build things this elegant and now here he was smashing them to bits.

“That’s the last of it in here,” said Jemma.

Fitz nodded. “Yeah, on to the next room.”

“You sure you destroyed everything?” asked May. She was positioned at the door, with Yo-Yo out in the hallway doing recon.

“Everything Chronicom related,” he said. “That’s standard S.H.I.E.L.D. tech there, which I don’t think we have the time to destroy.” He was pointing at a wall panel, the lights on it flashing red. Meaning there was an intruder. But as he was watching it stopped flashing.

“Do you hear that?” asked Jemma.

“Here what? It’s quiet.”

“That’s what I mean. There aren’t any more gunshots.”

They both looked at May. “Ward’s done fighting,” she said. “We don’t have much time. Let’s move.”

She turned to leave but that’s when a Chronicom appeared, holding Yo-Yo by the throat. Yo-Yo’s eyes were wide and darting around, but the alien’s grip was so tight she couldn’t speak.

“Agents May, Simmons, and Fitz. Please come with us,” said a voice from the hallway. “Or we will be forced to harm your colleague.” Fitz couldn’t see how many Chronicoms there were, but from the way May raised her hands in surrender there must have been too many for her to fight alone. He should have learned kung-fu.

They were grabbed by Chronicoms and led to a larger room, one with a single table and chair in its center. Other Chronicoms were there, holding Mack and Deke. Agent Coulson lay on the floor, apparently unconscious. His eyes were open and flickering with bursts of light, though. How could a human’s eyes flicker like that?

“It is over,” said a Chronicom, standing by the table in the room’s center. He was tall and expressionless, like all the others. “We have captured you, and your friend has been decommissioned.” He gestured toward Agent Coulson. “We will end your lives, and then we will take your planet as our own.” He attempted to stretch his face into a smile. “Thank you for your cooperation. You have been most helpful.”

“Helpful?” said Mack. “Way I see it we’ve nearly destroyed you, and we’ll find a way out of this and finish the job.”

“You do not understand,” said the Chronicom. “There was a problem with our plan, but you have solved it for us. You have delivered to us exactly what we need.” He held up a small metal ball. The bioweapon cure. He must have taken it from Ward.

Suddenly, a screen at the back of the room flickered on, filled by the face of Director Malick. He appeared to be seated in the back of a vehicle. “Friends, I see our mission was a success.”

“Yes,” said the lead Chronicom. “Thank you for alerting us of their impending arrival.”

A face Fitz didn’t recognize leaned into view beside Malick. “It was my pleasure to be of service,” the man said.

“Bakshi?” said Jemma. “But you’re in the Resistance.”

“I think we know who the leak is,” said the Director. So it hadn’t been Ward. Fitz was sad that his friend couldn’t have lived long enough to clear his name.

“I see you have the device,” said Malick. 

The lead Chronicom held the cure toward the screen. “They brought it to us. We should be able to replicate it for your use.”

“Excellent. We’ll be there momentarily. This is the start of a better world.” Malick’s face dissolved into darkness, and the room was left uncomfortably silent.

“What did you mean, you’ll replicate it for their use? What are you using that for?” Jemma was struggling with the Chronicom holding her. Fitz wished she wouldn’t.

“It is exactly what we needed,” said the Chronicom, placing the ball on the table. He pulled another device, a larger and bulkier one from his pocket. Fitz had seen this one too.

“We were prepared to cleanse all life on this planet the slow way, life by life, though it would be tedious. But imagine our delight when we discovered there was already technology that could wipe out all life at the touch of a trigger.” He held up the other device for them to see. It was the bioweapon, the one Fitz had helped design.

“You’re going to destroy all life, with that?” Deke sounded like his Chronicom was choking him, or maybe he was emotional. “That’s messed up.”

“I think you mean elegant,” said the Chronicom. “Make much larger versions of these, set them off around the planet, and then repopulate with our own race in the way we have always intended.”

“Then why do you need the cure, if you want to destroy everything?” Jemma was not letting up on the topic of the cure. She had worked so hard on it that she couldn’t believe she had somehow helped them. Fitz knew how she felt.

“When we joined with Malick and this S.H.I.E.L.D. there was some— _concern_ about our plans.” Fitz bet there was. Malick might be evil, but he’d die along with everyone else if the bioweapon was unleashed on the world. “But when we heard that you were building this—” he pointed to the cure— “we had our way of earning Malick’s assistance.”

“You’re going to protect them, cure them,” said May.

“Only them. S.H.I.E.L.D. and its enforcers will be given the cure, kept safe until the biothreat has passed, and then they will assist us in ruling this planet. That was our agreement.” He turned to Jemma. “It was only possible because of your efforts. On behalf of our species, we thank you.”

“No,” yelled Jemma. She was still struggling against her Chronicom handler.

“Jemma, please,” Fitz said. He tried to beg her with his eyes to stop drawing attention to herself, to stop fighting. Her eyes were pleading too, but they were pleading for him to help her, which he couldn’t do. He felt powerless.

“Should we tidy up in anticipation of Malick’s arrival?” asked the Chronicom holding Deke.

“Yes, we should make a demonstration of strength, since our numbers are few and our technology infected by the virus. They do not need to think us weak.”

The lead Chronicom tapped the side of the bioweapon in his hand, and it made a clicking noise. A wisp of smoke vented from its side and then dissolved into the air. Fitz felt his throat constrict.

The other members of his team, his friends, his new colleagues, the woman he was growing to love, all began to choke and wheeze.

“Leave them here to expire,” said the lead Chronicom. He picked up the tiny ball that could save their lives. “Let’s take this to the entrance to prepare for Malick and his staff’s arrival. We can show them how well the device works.”

Fitz couldn’t breathe. The Chronicom restraining him let go, and he dropped to the floor like a lead weight. He heard the others fall too, gasping and retching around him. Loud footsteps echoed in his ears. A door slammed. He sensed the Chronicoms were gone, but his vision was blurring, and his other senses were dulling. Hypoxia. Soon he would be unconscious.

“Did,” he heard the Director gasp out, “Anyone. Else. Have. The. Cure.”

“Only. One,” he heard Deke say.

“Daisy,” the Director said.

Fitz’s vision had gone black, and he made one last attempt at a breath. He felt a breeze beside him, but in his hazy mind it took him a moment to realize the door had opened. Someone was moving across the room, coughing. He heard a faint whirring sound, a sound that he knew. And then there was a searing through his lungs, like they been infused with menthol. He took a deep breath, and he heard others around him doing the same. He threw his lungs open and breathed and breathed, like he would never get enough air. His vision began to clear. Ward appeared above him.

“Fitz, you ok?” Ward was kneeling over him. Ward was still coughing and taking deep breaths, but he looked better than Fitz felt.

“Jemma?” asked Fitz.

“She’s ok. I’m going to check on the others, but I think everyone’s breathing.” Ward was scanning the room. “Except Coulson. I’ll go check on him.”

“Don’t bother,” May said. Her voice sounded like her throat had been scoured with a metal scrub brush. “He’s a robot. We’ll reboot him later.”

Huh, that explained a lot, thought Fitz.

He heard a ding and then Jemma’s voice echoed around the room. “Biothreat neutralized.” He had recorded her saying it in the lab.

“Is that the cure?” asked Yo-Yo.

“Where did you get it?” asked Deke.

“I took one from the plane, just in case,” said Ward. “I’ve seen what that bioweapon does.”

“Good thinking,” the Director coughed, and it sounded like he was trying to sit up. That man was so strong. Fitz still felt like there was an elephant sitting on his chest. “But we’ve still got about a dozen Chronicoms and all the top brass of S.H.I.E.L.D. incoming. And they have another cure device.”

At that moment an explosion shook the whole building. It sounded like a massive bomb had exploded at the front of the base. Then the floor began to vibrate under them. There were screams and gunshots in the distance.

“What’s happening? Is that an earthquake?” asked Ward.

“No,” said May. “That’s the Cavalry.”

“Daisy’s on route,” Dr. Simmons said over comms. She hadn’t said much since they were captured; Fitz realized now she and Daisy must have been busy attempting a rescue.

“Thank God,” said the Director. Fitz heard him flop back down to the floor. “I’m getting too old for this.”

Another quake shook the room, this one much closer. There was less gunfire, and he could hear sounds of fighting. And then the room to the door exploded with Daisy at its center. Ward’s eyes lit up and his mouth fell open in shock. She did like to make an entrance.

“Heard you guys could use a rescue.”

“You have no idea,” said Yo-Yo.

“They set off a bioweapon, Daisy. Be careful,” said Fitz.

“Simmons sent me with a bunch of these,” said Daisy, holding up another cure device. “They work great. Good job guys.”

Daisy was crossing the room to Ward. She grabbed his arm to help him stand. “I’ve got them on the run, but there are still a couple Chronicoms in the building. You OK to help me take them out?”

Ward was still staring at her like she might be a hallucination. “You’re—”

“Daisy, from another dimension. We’ll chat later.”

Ward nodded, and they took off out the door. “Simmons is on her way with medical supplies,” she called over her shoulder. “She had to find a spot to land the Zephyr.”

“Well, I’m just gonna say it,” said the Director. “This is my last one of these.”

“Amen to that,” said Yo-Yo, with a cough.

“I want a nap,” said May.

“A long bike ride.”

“A whole case of Zima,” said Deke.

The sounds of fighting and the occasional quake carried into their room, but they grew more and more infrequent. The team lay sprawled out on the floor, calling out their deepest desires in ragged voices, until help arrived. Fitz didn’t say anything, but then he only had one deep desire. If he concentrated, he could just make out the sound of her breathing beside him. And right now that was enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, instead of being the cause of Fitz's hypoxia this Ward cures it. I didn't set out to write a Ward redemption fic (not a big fan of his), but this all seemed to write itself.


	8. Chapter 8

Fitz took another deep breath and then removed the mask. “How long do I need to use this?” he asked.

Dr. Simmons was checking on another patient—the Director. She didn’t look up from her tablet as she said, “Not until I clear you.”

Jemma, who had been cleared first (Fitz suspected it was so she could act as Dr. Simmons’s assistant, but he wasn’t going to comment on her methods), came over to check on him. The team was seated on every surface of the comms area of the ship, with oxygen masks over their faces. Even Daisy and Ward were there, though they hadn’t had as much exposure to the bioweapon as the rest of them. There were a few other injuries to tend to, but only cuts and bruises.

Jemma held the mask back up to Fitz’s face. “Just to be safe,” she said. She jerked her head back in Dr. Simmons’s direction. “And so she won’t scold you.”

“Nana’s just doing her job,” said Deke. He was stretched out across three rolling chairs. Fitz had thought he was napping. “She saved all our lives, you know.” He put the mask back on his face and closed his eyes.

Jemma looked at Fitz and rolled her eyes, but she wore a warm smile. He wasn’t sure what the bond was between Deke and Dr. Simmons (surely this talk of grandparents was nonsense—even for these dimension-hoppers that was ridiculous), but she and Jemma were both fond of him. It wasn’t the kind of fondness that made him jealous, but it did frustrate him. Everything about Deke frustrated him.

Deke was correct, though. Dr. Simmons had helped save their lives. After she and Daisy had heard the Chronicoms explain their plan and even before the aliens had detonated the bioweapon, the pair had sprung into action. Daisy had parachuted out of the ship to infiltrate the base, and Dr. Simmons had directed their missiles at the fleet of vehicles containing all of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s top brass. She had also sent one missile into the base’s entrance, leveling most of the Chronicoms waiting for Malick and clearing a path for Daisy. She had then landed the Zephyr and prepared the breathing apparatus for the team. She had apparently designed the masks to help Yo-Yo with a previous lung issue.

“I think the person we need to thank is Ward,” said Jemma. She turned her thousand-watt smile in his direction, and Ward gave her a nod, his mask still covering his face. “If he hadn’t thought to bring another cure device, none of us would have survived until Daisy arrived.” Fitz took off his mask long enough to give Ward a smile.

“You all did well,” said the Director. Dr. Simmons was removing his mask and handing him a bottle of water. “This was a team effort, and I couldn’t be prouder.”

Fitz felt warmth spread in his chest from the Director’s praise. He could see why the others were willing to follow him through space and time. He wished he could.

Their foes were vanquished, which meant that the team would probably be wanting his help to get back home now. He hadn’t figured out how yet—the dimension jump they’d done before had been a hold your breath and hope kind of thing. A one-time leap into the unknown. It had worked, though, so he didn’t see why he couldn’t figure out a way to reverse it. It was much more complicated, getting them back to a different point in space and time than they’d left. Given some time—

“You’re all set,” said Dr. Simmons. She was giving Fitz some tablets and a water. “If you have any difficulty breathing, come to me immediately. But I don’t see any sign of the bioweapon left in your system.” She looked at Jemma. “Well done both of you on that device.” Then she moved on to Daisy, who was at a computer terminal, holding her mask up to her face with one hand and scouring the internet with the other. “I told you to relax,” said Dr. Simmons.

“You relax, Nurse Ratched.”

“Do you feel OK?” Jemma asked Fitz.

He took a deep breath. He did feel better. “Yeah. I don’t know what she gave us, but it worked like magic.” He looked at Dr. Simmons. That woman was a miracle.

Jemma stepped between him and Dr. Simmons, blocking his view. “There’s no such thing as magic,” she said. He couldn’t tell if she was unhappy that he had broken a sacred vow of science or because of the way he had been gazing at Dr. Simmons, but she looked a little miffed. “Can I speak to you alone?” she asked.

Fitz followed her into the hangar, which was still full of weapons. She took them to a quiet corner, out of sight of the rest of the team. “I have something to tell you,” she said.

Fitz felt his stomach drop. Nothing good ever came after those words. His brain began running through possible scenarios. Could she have heard about his interest in her from Daisy? Was he about to get rejected before he’d even had the chance to tell her how he felt?

“They’re leaving,” she said.

“What?”

“The team. From the other dimension. They’re leaving us.”

Oh. “I knew that. Once we help them figure out how—”

“No, that’s just it. Dr. Simmons already figured it out.”

Fitz was too stunned to respond.

“She’s been working on it this entire time. She kept if from us, I guess because they were afraid that we would think they weren’t really invested in helping us if they were trying to get back.”

That must have been what Dr. Simmons was hiding from him, thought Fitz. He could have helped, had he known. “I wouldn’t have been upset with them,” he said. “I know they want to go home.” He knew she missed him.

“Yeah, but once we’re cleared and healthy, they’re going to say goodbye. Right away.”

Right away? Fitz hadn’t been prepared for just how hard this would hit him. He felt like he had been punched in the gut. Would they leave him in a field somewhere? Or back in his apartment, which would have been ransacked by S.H.I.E.L.D. by now? What was he supposed to do? And how was he supposed to do it by himself?

Jemma put a hand on his forearm. “What you’re feeling now, that’s how I felt when they told me.”

“When did they tell you?”

“Before the mission. Dr. Simmons pulled me aside. She wanted me to check her work, make sure it was correct.”

That explained why he had seen them arguing before. “Why not me?” he asked. Again, he felt hurt.

“I don’t know. I think,” she paused, and her hand travelled from his arm down to his hand. “I think she—she feels things for you. Sometimes the way she looks at you…I think she didn’t want to hurt you by telling you she was leaving.”

“It’s the other me,” he said. He liked holding her hand. “It’s not about me; it’s about him.”

Jemma pulled him a little closer. “I’m not sure what the difference is any more, to be honest.” Her eyes flicked down to his lips, and he felt a rush of heat up his spine. What the hell was happening?

“Jemma,” he found himself saying. He took his eyes from hers (they were so beautiful they were doing something frightening to his insides) and looked at their joined hands. “I was wanting to tell you something as well,” he said.

He was interrupted by Deke, who popped up behind them without warning. Bloody menace. “Bobo, Nana,” he said. “Mack needs everyone back for a meeting. He’s got news.” He caught sight of their hands and said, “Great, love it. This is a good direction for the two of you.” He winked at Fitz, who immediately dropped Jemma’s hand and fought the urge to punch him.

Jemma put her hand on Fitz’s back (so there was going to be more touching in his future—he was OK with that) and guided him toward the door. “Let’s go hear the news,” she said.

Deke stepped in beside them and whispered in Fitz’s ear, “If you need any lemons, just let me know. I got you.”

Fitz swatted at him like he was an annoying fly. He’d miss many things when they left, but he wouldn’t miss Deke.

Back in the comms center, the team was seated for another meeting. Everyone looked exhausted. Agent Coulson was beside May, fully rebooted and smirking at them. Fitz was relieved to see him but realized with a stab of pain that this might be his last chance to do so.

“Daisy has some exciting information,” said the Director, “so I’ll let her proceed.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I’ve been monitoring the aftermath of our mission, and it’s incredible.” She used her keyboard to throw the images from her screen onto every monitor in the room. They were surrounded by photos of the damaged base and the faces of Malick and other S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives that had been killed: Sitwell, Bakshi, Von Strucker. Even Dr. Whitehall.

“Dr. Whitehall?” said Jemma. “There are rumors he designed the bioweapon. That’s a big get.”

“This is every top S.H.I.E.L.D. leader. Every Level 8 and above agent, wiped out,” said Ward.

“I don’t see Garrett,” said Coulson.

“Who?” asked Ward.

“The point is,” said Daisy, “they’re not just killed.” She put up more images—headlines and breaking tweets. Faces of the victims of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s atrocities. “They’re being outed as bad guys. Connected to the recent Chronicom attacks, the bioweapon, police brutality, and countless other horrific things. Someone’s putting out the truth, and they have the receipts.”

“Who?” asked Yo-Yo.

Daisy clicked her keyboard again. Every screen in the room displayed a muted video of a man making a speech. A man with a familiar face. 

“Huh,” said Agent Coulson. “I didn’t see that coming.”

Daisy grinned. “You can’t make this stuff up.” She unmuted the video, and Agent Coulson’s voice echoed around them.

“And that is why we are coming out of the shadows. This tragedy has revealed the truth, and it is time for action. It is time to end the fear, end the oppression, and take back our world from those who claimed they would protect us. Join us. Join our cause. We are the Resistance.”

The team sat in stunned silence and watched the images scroll by. Crowds taking to the streets, carrying signs and yelling in front of S.H.I.E.L.D. bases. “People are protesting. They’re taking a stand.”

Fitz felt Jemma’s hand take its place back in his. Maybe this was a world he could face. And maybe he wouldn’t have to do it alone.

xxx

Fitz stepped off the Zephyr and into a green field. He saw a cottage and a large barn. Jemma gasped beside him.

“Perthshire,” she said. She turned back to look at the team, all lined up at the base of the ramp watching them. “How did you know—” she started to say, but then she looked at Dr. Simmons, who was smiling at her. “Thank you,” she said.

“Perthshire?” said Fitz. He wasn’t sure he had heard right. He looked again at the cottage and the field and—“But this is _Scotland_ , Jemma.”

She laughed, a peal of joyful bells, and he stared at her in shock. This is where she wanted to be taken?

Daisy and Deke walked up and handed them keys and paperwork.

“We bought it outright, so no need to worry about rent. And we filled the barn with some toys you might enjoy.” Daisy hugged Jemma. “And there’s a breakfast nook,” she said with a wink at Fitz over Jemma’s shoulder.

“I still don’t know why you didn’t want a castle,” said Deke. He lunged at Fitz for an awkward sort of hug, and he wasn’t letting go.

Fitz patted his back. “Ok, that’s enough.”

Deke pulled away with tears in his eyes, and for the first time Fitz felt for the young man. He clearly had some psychological issues, but his attachment to Fitz and Jemma was genuine. “Hope you see your Bobo soon,” Fitz said.

Deke sniffed. “Take care of her,” he said.

They made the rounds, each team member taking turns giving them hugs and saying goodbye. Fitz was surprised how right they had been—this was a family. He had never been cared for in this way before. He would miss them.

The last person to say goodbye to him was Dr. Simmons. He almost thought she’d forgotten him. She stood apart, not looking at him. He walked over to her. “Dr. Simmons?”

She turned to him, and he saw that she was fighting back tears. “I know you’re not him, but, also, you _are_ him, and I just—I don’t know how to leave you.” Her voice broke.

He wrapped her in a hug. “You’ll see him soon,” he said into her hair. “It’s over now.”

She stepped out of his hug and wiped her face. “It’s never over,” she said. “What fun would that be?” She smiled at someone over his shoulder. Jemma walked up beside him and took his arm. The two women nodded at one another. Fitz assumed they didn’t need to speak to be understood.

Dr. Simmons turned and walked away, and he and Jemma waved and watched the ship take flight. They stood together, staring at the sky until the plane disappeared. A bird sang its song and the air smelled of wet grass, and Fitz was surprised at how still the world suddenly felt around him. Jemma tugged at his hand.

“Let’s go see what toys they left us,” she said. They walked toward the barn hand in hand, taking in the sights and smells and sounds of their new home. There wasn’t any need to hurry, and maybe there never would be again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's only a tiny epilogue left. After the tears of this chapter (I cried writing it), I had to leave on a happier note.


	9. Epilogue

Hunter laughed so hard he almost dropped his beer. “You said that? To a woman?”

Mack shrugged. “She agreed to a second date, didn’t she?”

Hunter looked at Fitz. “You believe this?”

“I’m telling you,” said Mack, “I’ve got a feeling about this one.”

“You had a feeling about the last one as well. All that bloody kale you ate.”

Jemma walked through the kitchen, running a hand through Fitz’s hair on her way to the back door. “What’s her name, Mack?”

“Elena.”

Jemma grinned at him as she closed the door behind her. “I think she sounds wonderful.”

“Face it, mate, you’re terrible at this.” Hunter gestured between himself and Fitz with the neck of his beer bottle. “Let Fitzy and I help.”

Mack raised an eyebrow. “And how’s your love life going? I noticed Bobbi didn’t fly us over here this time.”

Hunter finished his beer and stood up from the table to retrieve a new one. “We’re on a temporary hiatus. Giving her the space she needs.”

“You mean the space she demanded when she threw you out again,” said Mack.

Fitz’s work phone beeped, and he checked it while the two men kept bickering. It was from Ward. Director Coulson was sending them some new tech requests. An actual shield. Cool.

It also looked like Coulson wanted them to fly to D.C. to meet with him in person, which happened a few times a year. Probably to ask them to head up the new S.H.I.E.L.D. academy again. The answer would of course be no.

Since he and Jemma had moved to their cottage, they had been recruited by the new S.H.I.E.L.D., the one reformed by Coulson and the Resistance. The world had demanded an end to the corruption and tyranny of the old S.H.I.E.L.D., and Coulson had been tasked with making the changes. They had fired and arrested agents responsible for criminal acts, outlawed excessive force, and hired more negotiators, peacekeepers, and social workers. Agents carried only non-lethal weapons now, most of them designed by Fitz and Simmons.

S.H.I.E.L.D. was also recruiting a more diverse stock of agents, the kind of people who aspired to help others not dominate them, and that included Mack. He had been a mechanic with the agency for a couple years now. He often came on these trips to Perthshire to retrieve the designs Fitz and Simmons created. He was the only one they had sent who could understand their work. Hunter was one of the agents assigned to protect their projects when they traveled, although mostly he just drank Fitz’s beer. Fitz didn’t mind.

“Looks like we’ll be making a trip to headquarters again,” Fitz said.

“Sweet,” said Hunter. “Off to see the big boss. He has excellent taste in beer.”

“You sure Jemma’s safe to travel?” asked Mack.

Jemma was six months pregnant, though that hadn’t slowed her down. Fitz had tried to keep her out of the lab when they’d first learned about the baby, but she kept sneaking off to work without him. He’d finally given up and just hid the more dangerous chemicals. He was certain she’d been on her way to their lab in the barn just now.

“You try telling her she can’t go,” said Fitz.

Mack shook his head. “No, thank you to that.”

“And I’m sure she and Bobbi need to discuss whatever mess you’ve made now,” he said to Hunter.

Hunter held his bottle over his heart like he’d been wounded. “Et tu, Fitz my love?”

Fitz sent back a message to Ward: _See you soon._ He listened to his friends describe all the things they’d show him at Headquarters, the new tech and old friends. He loved visiting them. They were the family he’d always wanted. He was already looking forward to the trip’s end, though, when he and Jemma could come back home. Here, with her, he was right where he wanted to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap. I don't have a Tumblr or any way to advertise what I write, so thanks for finding and reading my story. I appreciate the comments and kudos more than you'll ever know!
> 
> Oh, and working on a sillier Season 1 era story next, if anyone's interested.


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